By Amelia Batayola

When we consider the era of ante- and post-bellum South and Reconstruction in the United States, racial oppression is definitely in the forefront of our historical imaginations as the most important informant and motivator of abolitionists and political activists. Though obviously race was a main social category through which oppression iterated itself, intersectional analysis of other systems of inequality that would have informed activism at the time are often excluded. In this paper, I narrow the lens of analysis substantially and consider how the act of rape informed the prominent female activists Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs. Rape manifested differently within the respective rhetoric and activisms of Wells and Jacobs. Their different attitudes on whose bodies were being violated, as well as a valuation of violated bodies, allowed them to empower themselves politically, and “challenge the Jezebel, Mammy, and Sapphire myths and stereotypes of African American women in the past, and also the stereotypes’ lingering legacies” (Oglesby 1371).

Abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, author of the autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, provided one of the most renowned accounts of sexual coercion that the enslaved experienced under their masters. Born into slavery in 1813, she eventually escaped and was later freed. Constructing her written narrative with changed names, with herself as the character Linda Brent, Jacobs used sexual predation and rape as a tool of rhetoric and as an artifact of the ills of slavery when arguing for abolition. She details Brent’s evasion of her master Mr. Flint, a married slave-owner who constantly makes sexual advances, by having a sexual relationship with Mr. Sands, an unmarried white businessman, out of desperate hope that he will free the children they conceive, though he ultimately does not (Jacobs). Though read as more amiable than Mr. Flint, Sands is still a rapist, as the relationship is constructed within a dichotomy that eradicates Brent’s choice to say no, founded on her knowledge that “white bodies matter,” and is therefore not true consent but coercion (Hopkins 9, 13). Jacobs illustrates through Incidents that Brent’s “status as “victim” is exacerbated by the additional dynamics of abuse, both psychological and sexual, which she has to endure” (Hopkins 16).

This victimization and ultimate sentimentalization of her narrative becomes an important tool in humanizing her plight and validating her political ideology to her audience. The social constructs of pre-war south posited that in the “commodity of American slavery, the black female body did not matter, except for reproduction, which swelled the numbers of the slave population and the pockets of slave masters” (Hopkins 6). Her rape informs her activism by affirming her personhood and criticizing her oppression. This is a direct challenge to the national narrative of the time that valued black female bodies the least aside from productivity. This engagement with identity politics extends itself further, as, in tandem with self-actualizing as a victim, Jacobs uses gendered rhetoric to appeal to the white southern ladies in power.

In a restrictive era of class values, “white women held black women to the same standard – that of the Cult-of-True-Womanhood, which asserted that womanly virtue resided in piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Hopkins 12). Though this clearly resulted in double bind, as the oppression of slavery prevented black women from ever meeting those standards and invited the vilification and condescension of their failings, in Incidents, “black women are presented as no different from their white counterparts, both want to be rescued and their virtue protected” (Hopkins 8). Jacobs’ attempt to overcome marginalization by aligning her morality with that of the dominant group connects further to issues of rape as an informant. Jacobs’ rape forces her and her audience to reimagine the political sphere to encompass the private realm as well as the public. Expanding her rhetoric to include spatialized and gendered identity politics “broadened the field of the political by collapsing the division between public and private, and by merging the fields of social and political history” (Oglesby 1372). This intersectional awareness strengthens her arguments and legitimizes her activism by asserting connections and ending separatist notions.

To Jacobs, the private realm quite possibly houses violation, as a space that poses particular danger “for the enslaved female, the space of no witnesses” (Hopkins 12). This is a realm that, within the current system, enslaved females have no powers of agency whatsoever, a space that reiterates that their bodies don’t matter. It constitutes another layer of disenfranchisement, a complete objectification of a person. Jacobs’ very real fear of this space comes from an “understanding of the social terrain as itself permeated and structured by whiteness, where blacks literally have no place, except as contingent dependents” (Rifkin 73). This experiential knowledge of embodying an identity that is barely recognized as human serves Jacobs as a foundation for her rhetoric through her narrative.

Incidents provides an example in which “Brent knows that white bodies matter; and therefore, needs to keep Flint in a “public space” in an attempt to keep his lechery in check (Hopkins 13). Brent evades Mr. Flint’s sexual harassment with her knowledge of the social environment. Brent’s actions demonstrate an attempted preservation of virtue, which serves to appeal to the dominant ideology. She is able to move from having no place but where her master puts her to identifying herself as belonging to the moral value system. Through that, Jacobs is able to critique the system in power even as she respects it by constructing her arguments “within a national frame, exposing how ideologies of privacy naturalize white privilege by denying the political character of black subordination and violation in white homes” (Rifkin 85).

Following this logic, she necessitates a protected space of her own that would constitute safety, and allow her to live according to the morality system in place. But it is only citizens who may be homeowners, who are allowed those protected domestic spheres. Jacobs complicates the meanings of private space and its connections to white citizenship and exclusion of black citizenship. By showing the alternate, she uses the potential of violation to “demonstrate that the security of… private property depends on the possession of a range of civic entitlements,” which illuminates the logical fallacies occurring within the white value model, and extends political activism to the private or domestic sphere (Rifkin 86). Jacobs uses rape to advocate for herself. She values her own body, and uses the politics surrounding its safety and violation in order to motivate and inform her activism. Her ‘if it can be victimized, it can also be virtuous’ argument legitimizes the struggle and “gives voice to the sexually victimized enslaved woman of nineteenth-century America” (Hopkins11)

If Jacobs harnesses the narrative of rape to empower herself, Ida B. Wells overturns the rape narrative to dismantle the national racialized myths that violate black bodies through lynching. Wells, an Anti-lynching black rights activist, was born into slavery 1862, and grew up during the tenuous time of Reconstruction after the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. Wells was made aware of dangers of white on black rape at a young age, informed by the experiences of her parents’ enslavements. In fact, Wells “knew that her paternal grandmother, Peggy, had most likely been raped by her white master and had given birth to the man’s only child- her father, James Wells” (Feimster 40). She was also subjected to the tumultuous fluctuations present within the reconstruction period, as the gains of citizenship for black Americans were constantly combated by white supremacy. A new political sphere could not fully combat the social climate in place, and “Emancipation… had not changed the way many southern whites viewed black men and women- as property” (Feimster 42).

This prior knowledge, coupled with the fact that she “had not suffered the dehumanizing effects of slavery and thus had not been forced to defer to whites or to concede her rights as a citizen without a fight,” created a new sense of agency and empowerment that fuelled Wells’ activism (Feimster 60). Her understanding of the foundational oppression her race faced in tandem with the hypocrisy present in the lynching of black men accused of raping white women forced her to question and resist the racialized myths and narratives surrounding aggressors and victims, positing it as another persecution her race had to overcome in their fight for equality.

Additionally, by touting black rape of white womanhood as the mainstream excuse for lynchings, white supremacists opened the political sphere to a dialogue on the violated body, allowing Wells to engage in the argument of exactly whose body was actually being violated and why. Wells combated this mythical narrative of the black rapist through thorough documentation. Her findings illuminated the fact that “more than two thirds of the African American men murdered by lynch mobs were never even accused of rape” (Bay 5). She argued the artificial nature of the black rapist through official channels, publishing gathered information.

Wells produced the pamphlet A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, dated 1892-1894. In A Red Record she uses tools of analysis to question the emergence of the myth of the black male rapist, as it was not a forefront issue during slavery, or during the civil war, despite the fact that white southern ladies were essentially abandoned with only their slaves for company (Wells 79). She criticizes the moral codes of the white system in power, stating, “virtue knows no color line” (Wells 80). Yet, at this time white supremacists and nightriders used systems of terror to suppress black political activity, “while simultaneously expanding their sexual power over black and white women” (Feimster 5). White indifference to the plight of black female rape elucidated Wells’ analysis of the “double standard” that lynch mobs “were not actually policing the crime of rape” but protecting their vested interests in white supremacy (Bay 127).

This accounts for the fact that “white men’s sexual assaults against black women were neither policed nor punished but love affairs between white women and black men, if discovered, often resulted in a lynching” (Bay 127) Wells’ denouncement of lynching meant that she was engaging in the racial and sexual politics of the era, criticizing the systems of hypocrisy that littered white rhetoric. In the vein of critique, Wells helped to politicize the violated black body by bringing it to national awareness, and interminably linking the gender and class aspects of lynching and rape so that “neither crime could be limited to the public and private spheres that were thought to divide the concerns of men and women” (Bay 127).

In conclusion, the act of rape manifested itself differently within the political activism of Ida B wells and Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs used her own rape to self-actualize and form ties to the dominant system in order to gain political power. She plays with identity politics as a victim to liken herself, through the values of white southern womanhood, to that of a citizen, deserving of protection from her country. Alternately, Wells used the national narrative of rape to open a dialogue and point out the fallacies of lynching as a corrective tool to social ills, as well as prove her analysis that lynching was a tool of white supremacy, not polici===ng. She uses the rape of white and black women to show that rape was justification of white supremacists to lynch and violate black bodies, and that it was not actually embedded in a moral coding. Her activism is seated in her experiential knowledge as the oppressed to garner perspective of the meanings of rape and lynching within the white/black binary and the male/female binary. She advocates for the violated black bodies of the lynched and raped under white supremacy, critiquing the system. Though each uses rape in different ways to inform their political activism, Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs usage of rape create intersectional connections when engaging in the political sphere and gaining political power.

Works Cited

1. Bay, Mia. To tell the truth freely: The life of Ida B. Wells. Macmillan, 2009.
2. Feimster, Crystal N. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and

Lynching. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.

3. Hopkins, Patricia D. “Seduction or Rape: Deconstructing the Black Female Body

in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Making Connections:Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cultural Diversity. 13.1 (2011). Print.

4. Jacobs, Harriet Ann, and Walter Teller. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed.

Lydia Maria Child. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

5. Oglesby, C. (2010), Gender and History of the Postbellum U.S. South. History

Compass, 8: 1369–1379.

6. Rifkin, Mark. “A Home Made Sacred By Protecting Laws”: Black Activist

Homemaking And Geographies Of Citizenship In ‘Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl.” Differences: A Journal Of Feminist Cultural Studies 18.2 (2007): 72-102.

7. Wells, Ida B. “A Red Record (1895).” Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Intro. Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP (1991): 138-252.