Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs was born enslaved in North Carolina, hid for seven years in a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic to escape a master who pursued her sexually, and reached the North in 1842. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the name Linda Brent with the help of Lydia Maria Child, is the fullest account of slavery from a woman’s side, of the particular tyranny over women’s bodies and the choices it forced. Its authorship was doubted until Jean Fagan Yellin proved it in the 1980s. She spent the war years in relief work among refugees in Washington and Alexandria.