Kommentar: |
Harriet Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child are two of the most prominent writers of nineteenth century America. While Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(1861) is arguably one of the most important slave narratives, for a long period of time scholarship treated the text as a novel and ascribed authorship to Lydia Maria Child ‒ the editor and a famous author herself. Although both women fought to abolish slavery before the Civil War and continued their political struggle for equality and women’s rights afterwards, the misconstruction of authorship speaks to the different situations the two women experienced in the nineteenth century. This seminar aims to introduce students to the historical context of nineteenth century America and look at the experiences of white and black women to understand where their political, social, and literary lives intersected and deviated. In particular, the seminar will engage with Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as well as the public persona and personal life of Harriet Jacobs. Similarly, we will deal with the prolific literary writing, editorial work, and political activism of Lydia Maria Child to better understand the situation of women, the barriers they encountered, their agency ‒ and the plurality of their perspectives. This seminar hopes to explore the fruitful yet also often uneasy conversations women led in white patriarchal America. The intellectual lives of Jacobs and Child foreshadow many of the challenges women and the feminist movement still face today. |