Six Women’s Slave Narratives

Written by six black women, these stories embody most of the predominant themes and narrative forms found in African-American women’s autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the first female slave narrative from the Americas, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), the collection includes writings by Old Elizabeth, Mattie J. Jackson, Lucy A. Delaney, Kate Drumgoold, and Annie L. Burton. Each of these stories reveals the black woman’s ability to recover in past oppression the hope for a better day.