Douglas Narrative
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Both Jacobs and Douglass wrote about personal experiences as slaves. Douglass saw the childrens and mothers problem while Jacobs showed the internal struggle of a wounded woman. Douglass spoke of being intellectual while Jacobs based her speech on the essence of remaining righteous. As Harriet Jacobs had her own inner struggle as a woman, Douglass had his own inner struggle: the intellectual one. Two different factors made the crucial impact on him: his mistress introduced him to the world of letters and his master forbade him to continue with education. The real intellectual suffering began when he started to realize what opportunities he would have being a free man. Many slaves chose whipping but did not give themselves to their master. Douglass describes this as well when he mentions seeing his aunt being whipped. This was the same situation. In Jacobs narrative it is mentioned that mistresses used to treat the slaves cruel, and she also experienced the struggle for intellectual development. All of these things are incorporated into her struggle as a woman. Douglass had as major problem, his situation and his masters changed from time to time.
” If it be disagreeable to allow colored people the same right and privileges as other citizens, we can do with our prejudice, what most of us often do with better feeling-we conceal it”
Childs was a white woman who argued in favor of admitting African Americans into full membership in society. She also did not believe significant progress for woman could be made until after the abolition of slavery. She believed that black men should get a chance to vote before the black woman did. She was in favor of the immediate emancipation of slaves. Inn saying this, Childs would have been shunned by respectable society in the mid-19th century because she went against the norm. She was a white woman fighting fro the emancipation