Please write a 5-7 page analytical essay on the relationship between gender and race in the ideology of women’s separate sphere that characterized early 19th century America.  The paper will be due in class on Tuesday June 26.
    Base your paper on at least three resources.  You must include Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Other sources can include the material Woloch presents in Women and the American Experience and the arguments in the Ulrich, Kerber, Blewett, Stansell, and White articles.  This topic is intentionally broad, but you should focus your argument.  If you have questions or would like to talk to me first about your argument, by all means email, set up an appointment, or make haste to my "office."
 

1. The Analytical Essay will be a serious attempt to deal with an historical problem.
2. After you have read Jacobs, formulate the THESIS STATEMENT you intend to defend in your paper.

 NOTE: A thesis statement (the word means "idea") is not a) a statement of the topic [e.g. "This paper is about Harriet Jacobs’ experience of slavery"], b) a statement of intention [e.g. “I will look at the way Jacobs wrote to an abolitionist audience"], c) a statement of a blindingly obvious truth [e.g. "Slavery was a barbaric institution"]. Rather a thesis statement seeks to summarize in one or two sentences the argument you will make in your paper, e.g. “Black women were not capable of meeting the basic tenets of purity, Harriet Jacobs explained in her nineteenth-century autobiographic account of slavery, because the institution of slavery had corrupted men and women, both white and black.  Although Jacobs risked alienating women in the abolitionist movement, her decision to publish her story, including her justification for why she bore children out of wedlock, forced white women to acknowledge that their race, as well as their gender, provided the foundation of women’s sphere." (Hmmm, not a bad thesis.)  Your paper would then consist of arguments to defend this thesis and to refute objections.

Style:  Follow standard Chicago guidelines for bibliography and notations.  I don't care if you use endnotes or footnotes, just stay consistent.  (Please do not use the social-scientific method of author, page references at the end of sentences within the text – it’s very distracting.)
     For more information on style see the guidelines and stylesheet on writing an analytical essay.
    How to Write an Analytical Essay
    Stylesheet
    Humor that makes sense only if you have a basic understanding of grammar.
    Grading Guidelines
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