Slavery was a brutal and dehumanizing institution, set up to oppress and control a section of the population based on race in the United States for the betterment of another race. The experiences of slaves in the United States (and the colonies) had both similarities and differences across gender. Using Frederick Douglass autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as your sources of evidence, explore the role that gender played in the ways that slaves were oppressed as well as the ways that African American slaves exercised agency (power) within their lives in face of this oppression.In order to fully develop your analysis of the role of gender in American slavery, you should include a review of the institution of slavery, what methods were employed to oppress and control African American slaves and what methods slaves employed to exercise power in the face of this oppression, and how these were similar and dissimilar across gender. Further, you should incorporate, region, law and religion into your analysis of both oppression and agency. Besides the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, you should incorporate information from Give Me Liberty, the movie 12 Years a Slave, and lecture, as well as any online sources you may want to utilized (except Wikipedia), but you must include detailed examples, at least three from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and three from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
