THE FREE WOMAN Harriet Jacobs

An elderly woman wearing a black gown in 19th century style sits in an ornately carved armchair, smiling at the camer. Her hands are clasped in her lap.
Portrait of Harriet Jacobs, 1894
public domain

When Harriet Jacobs’ enslaver threatened to sell her children away to the plantation unless she accepted his sexual abuse, she decided the only way to keep them safe was to run. But with no resources and no way to get north, where could she go instead? The answer is an astonishing one. Jacobs’ story is one of the most dramatic and remarkable ‘slave narratives’ in United States history, yet for over 100 years, everyone believed it was fiction.

With our guest Dr. Maria Windell, discover the incredible life and astonishing history of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and a powerful activist, abolitionist and educator in the ninteenth century United States.

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

A volume of the Harriet Jacobs family papers are available from the National Archives and are a treasure trove of additional information. Find the book at a library near you.

You can find images of the parlor and front passage of the Norcom home, where Harriet Jacobs was enslaved from age thirteen to twenty-six, where they have been preserved at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.




A woman with light brown hair, light skin, and brown eyes looks toward the camera smiling slightly. Bookshelves full of books are in the background.Maria A. Windell is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches classes on ethnic and early US literatures. Her research focuses on intersections between the US and the Americas, and her book Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She co-edited, with Jesse Alemán, a special issue of English Language Notes on “Latinx Lives in Hemispheric Context.” She is currently working on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary flirts and the classification of coquette hummingbirds in Central America.


Music featured in this episode included


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2 Comments

  1. Hi Katie and Olivia,
    I love your podcast so much! It brings so much joy to my day to hear about the history of women erased from history.
    I particularly enjoyed this episode about Harriet Jacobs because I just studied this book in my graduate class. She was a truly amazing woman (Harriet Jacobs).
    Keep up the amazing work!
    A happy listener,
    Heather

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