The Curse of Gender in Ellen Craft' and Harriet Jacobs' Books

The Disdain of Gender

Does being a man equate to power? Being a man in todays’ society is a privilege that can bring many benefits. It can bring higher wages, credibility, and undeserving success. Being a man in the 1800s means having absolute power over any and everything, of course, only if you’re a white man. Women get to control absolutely nothing. In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, you get to look into the curse of gender. Ellen Craft and Harriet Jacobs show readers how being a female can bring relentless torment, almost no credibility, and unavoidable problems.

Each narrative shows gender from a different perspective. Ellen Craft in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom shows how temporarily switching her gender to male literally liberates her. Harriet Jacobs in Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl shows how being a woman attracts physical danger. “No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men” (Jacobs 231).

Harriet Jacobs says this after she realizes that no one will help her escape the vile words of Dr. Flint. All women during this time were thought of as inferior to men, but black women were not even thought of as human. Because of this, Harriet had to take all of the crude gestures coming towards her and could not report anything. Her master threatened her with rape and abuse and she was not allowed to challenge his advances. Harriet’s master treated her as if she were worthless and burdened her with all of the problems in the world. I believe that she almost hated her womanhood. It was a major disadvantage and a source of hardship for her. The only way she could take control of some of her problems was if she willingly got pregnant by another white man.

This helped her escape getting raped. She made a choice that she thought was in her best interest but her freewill is taken away after this choice. She was stripped of her innocent mind and sanity. This is all simply because she was a black woman.Ellen Craft’s situation is a little less morbid. While being a woman was difficult for Ellen Craft, she liked her femininity. Her being a woman was not the biggest source of her hardships. “My wife had no ambition whatever to assume this disguise, and would not have done so had it been possible to have obtained our liberty by more simple means; but we knew it was not customary in the South for ladies to travel with male servants” (Craft 433).

Ellen did not want to assume the role of a man. While she was a slave, she never suffered solely for being a black woman, she suffered because she was just a slave. She was very fair. Because of this, people may have mistaken her for a white woman. This may have played a part in her treatment. Her sufferings as a black woman were not as harsh because she was so nearly white. Her master’s family treated her with some dignity.Both women faced discrimination and hardships, but I do believe that the darker the skin of a black woman, the more problems she would have faced in this time.

In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, a white mistress Ellen meets mentions that she had a slave that was whiter than she was and would have no problem with finding a husband (437). This suggests that if you are a nearly white female, you may receive better treatment. It may be harder to hate being a woman if you are treated as such. Another factor is if one’s master is cruel and makes suggestive remarks, a slave may feel doomed in the body of a woman. Because Ellen’s master was more kind, she felt no need to hate being a woman. Ellen temporarily becoming a man made her feel uncomfortable, but if Harriet could have switched roles with a man, it may have made her feel liberated.

Works Cited:

1. Craft, Ellen, and William Craft. “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature 3rd edition Vol.1, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Valerie Smith, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, 429-444.
2. Jacobs, Harriet. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature 3rd edition Vol.1, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Valerie Smith, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, 224-261.