10. Document Project 10: Lives in Slavery

Quiz for Document 10.6 Harriet Jacobs, A Girl Threatened by Sexual Exploitation

Quiz for Document 10.6: Harriet Jacobs, A Girl Threatened by Sexual Exploitation

Choose the best answer for each question.

1. What does Harriet Jacobs’s experience demonstrate about the recourse available for abused or mistreated slave women?

Women of all races often helped one another.

Slaves had separate slave courts to address issues.

Slave women had little to no options for recourse.

Slave men would defend and protect the women.

2. In addition to the physical violations she faced, what seemed to upset Jacobs the most about her master’s behavior?

He corrupted an innocent mind.

He raped other slave women as well.

He still went to church.

He physically beat all of his slaves.

3. What does Jacobs’s narrative and experience reveal about slave owners’ wives?

Wives often abused young slaves as well.

They, too, had to deal with the misdeeds of slave masters.

White women defended their black female slaves against rape.

Mistresses preferred their husbands’ offspring as house servants.

4. Why did beauty “hasten the degradation of the female slave,” according to Harriet Jacobs ?

An attractive slave was more likely to be sexually abused by her owner.

The wife of the owner was more likely to grow jealous and send an attractive female slave to the fields.

Beauty increased her value, so she was more likely to be sold and separated from her family.

Beauty in a slave increased the likelihood that the mistress would punish her with violence.

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