SOURCE: "'Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters': Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation," in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 40-61.

In the following essay, Carby explores the influence of the nineteenth-century conception of "true womanhood" on Incidents and contends that Jacobs used the events of her life to "critique conventional standards of female behavior and to question their relevance and applicability to the experience of black women."

A survey of the general terrain of images and stereotypes produced by antebellum sexual ideologies is a necessary but only preliminary contribution to understanding how the ideology of true womanhood influenced and, to a large extent, determined the shape of the public voice of black women writers. What remains to be considered is how an ideology that excluded black women from the category "women" affected the ways in which they wrote...