Harriet Jacobs: Sexual Exploitation of Enslaved Women Documented

Harriet Jacobs, enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina, documented in her 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl the systematic sexual harassment and coercion she endured from her enslaver Dr. James Norcom beginning when she was approximately 13 years old. To avoid Norcom's assaults she entered a relationship with another white man, Samuel Sawyer, with whom she had two children. She hid for seven years in a tiny crawl space above her grandmother's house before escaping north. Her memoir provided the first detailed first-person account by an enslaved woman of the sexual violence endemic to slavery. Scholars estimate sexual exploitation was near-universal for enslaved women on large plantations.