In this project I will be looking at African american women, and their roles as authors.  How they got to where they felt they could tell their stories, and how white abolitionist women gave them the push they needed.  Also I'll be talking about the stereotypes and hurdles they had to over come to be published, as well as the material itself, the messages they sent.  African American Female authors let other americans in on their experiences, and attempted to clarify things for the masses.  They gave their experience and slavery a sense of reality for those who read their books.  Their readers felt like they themselves were experiencing what they read, which allowed slavery to become more of a reality to those in the north,as well as those of the future.

    Before there were female African American writers who wrote about slavery, there were the white abolitionist writers who paved the road for them.  In this review the author, Diane Roberts, describes how the Northern Abolisionist women used sexuality and race to characterize slavery in the south.  As stated, "by using the vocabulary of the gothic novel to represent the South's perversion and debasment, abolitionist authors were able to construct a formulaic, morally inferior South based on restrictive definitions and appropriations of the female body." This allowed African American women to realize it was okay to tell their stories, and that they wouldn't be rejected by everyone.  People wanted to hear about their stories and their experiences.

    In this review, Jean Fagan Yellin traces how white anti-slavery abolitionlist women lead the way for African american Female slaves in writing about their experiences and slavery.  She examines how the famous abolitionist motif of an enchained slave man, has been transformed into one concerning women as well.  The images of female slaves "came into a powerful cultural currency".  Yellin looks at the 'sisterly bond' between the two races and how they both "serve  to emphasize less the vicitmization of African american women under patriarchal slavery, but more through a process of identification as 'sisters'."

    In her review, Jennifer Fleischner wants her readers to think about the female African American author as more than just a sexual object in their autobiographies and stories.  She wants them to be remebered for more, and to have their story truly read and looked at instead of skimmed over.  Jennifer wants readers to recognize that Slave narratives are true, and that what they are reading did actually happen.  She believes that some readers look at the narratives in a less autobiographical sense because of the topics covered. Fleischner states that Child's story and views are ones of the "slave woman in terms of sexual rivalry and betrayal.  In part because she was childless and, though married, practically husbandless."  Her entire study is asking the reader to look deeper into the material of African American Female authors.  "Fleischner's study  invites us to consider anew the veiled complexities of the autobiographical ex-slave subject and to recognize that 'working over the slavery past in memory is one form of labor from which their is no ready release', either for the ex-slave narrative or her later readers."