Research Paper on:
'My Bondage and My Freedom' by Frederick Douglass and Gender Issues

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
reader, the true accounts of the life of a slave, and in Douglass case, they also discuss aspects of freedom from that enslavement. His most notorious work is "The Narrative  of the Life of Frederick Douglass," a work that details his youth as a slave, the possession of freedom, and his first experiences with freedom. "Ten years later Douglasss second  autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, deconstructs his 1845 self-portrait with typical romantic irony" (Campbell). This particular book "As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has pointed out...has been largely ignored ...because  it is longer and less accessible than Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" (My Bondage and My Freedom: Frederick Douglass). But this work also possesses a great deal of  enlightening material. In the following paper we examine this particular work and discusses Douglass approach to gender issues. The paper first examines women and the absence of women in his  work and then discusses men and the absence of men within the same work. Women and the Absence of Women Again, it should be understood that Frederick Douglass  work is essentially a slave narrative and as such it is told from the perspective of a former slave, a male slave in this case. The experiences of Douglass are  not the experiences of a woman and therefor he is not necessarily able to present the reader with a powerful focus on the issues which relate to women. However, it  should also be understood that Douglass was a advocate for womens rights. In fact, "Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of woman suffrage. Frederick Douglass, a former slave  and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, and in an editorial published that year in The North Star, wrote,