Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

In the South, relationships between White and Black women existed within the planter system, which was built on the unwavering twin pillars of White supremacy and patriarchy. White women seldom identified with the conditions that Black women—particularly the enslaved—faced. Instead, White women sorted Black women into two categories—sources of reproduction, which made them vulnerable to sexual assault, or “mammies” beyond childbearing age, who served as sources of maternal succor to the community. For Mrs. Flint, for example, Jacobs fell into the former, while her grandmother, Martha, was in the latter.

Though Jacobs tries to distinguish between “good” and “bad” mistresses, all of them were complicit in a system that allowed for the ownership of other human beings. Still, Jacobs’s insistence on centering women in her narrative is an attempt to sympathize with the Anglophone White women who would have been likely to read it. Thus, while Mrs. Flint and a couple of others are presented as exceptionally cruel, Jacobs balances these portraits with those of women like the two Mrs. Bruces, who were truer to the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house,” or the figure of idealized true womanhood.