Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs’ appalling autobiographical narrative of her experience of slavery, is a story very much interwoven with the “cult of true womanhood.” Jacobs hardly embodied the ideal picture of true womanhood painted by white, middle-class Northeastern Americans: delicate, white, submissive, pious and pure. However, she was – in a sense – a darker-skinned, trial-tried reflection of that True Woman. In her account, an understanding seeps through the pages that true womanhood was a concept in need of expansion, or perhaps negation. The Northern view of true womanhood required resourc