Nineteenth-century African American women were faced with the formidable task of dismantling the negative connotations that the constructs of race, class, and gender placed on them. Harriet Jacobs in her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a slave girl, (1861) subverted these challenges and proceeded to re-shape the autobiographical form, thereby denying the power of race, class, and gender. Whatever may be the limitations of the form she chooses to represent her story, it is based on her experience of triple marginalization. Though much has been written about Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a slave girl, since its 1973 edition appeared, relatively little critical attention has been given to the concept of intersectionality in the text. This chapter considers the ways how the first African American narrative written by a slave woman in the nineteenth century could identify the triple system of oppression in the lives of African American women. Written by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a slave girl (hereafter referred to as Incidents) testify to the peculiar nature of the violence, violation and degradation slavery can perpetuate on black women. It is remarkable that as early as 1840s, and even before the rise of the women’s movement, Jacobs could distinguish the triple nature of the black woman’s enslavement.

Race, Class, Gender, Autobiography, life, society, experience, violence, women