According to Yellin, Incidents has a "radical feminist content."[48] Yellin states that Incidents is linked to the then popular genre of the seduction novel. That genre, examples of which include Charlotte Temple (1791) and The Quadroons, written in 1842 by M. Lydia Child, who would later become the editor of Incidents, features the story of a virtuous, but helpless woman seduced by a man. Her failure to adhere to the standard of sexual behavior set by the "white patriarchy",[49] "inevitably" leads to her "self-destruction and death". Although Jacobs describes her sexual transgression (i.e. the liaison with Sawyer) in terms of guilt and sin, she also sees it as a "mistaken tactic in the struggle for freedom". Most important, the book does not end with self-destruction, but with liberty.[50]
According to Yellin, "a central pattern in Incidents shows white women betraying allegiances of race and class to assert their stronger allegiance to the sisterhood of all women": When Jacobs goes into hiding, a White woman who is herself a slaveholder hides her in her own house for a month, and when she is threatened with recapture, her female employer's plan to rescue her involves entrusting her own baby to Jacobs.[51]
Jacobs presents herself as struggling to build a home for herself and her children. "This endorsement of domestic values links Incidents to what has been called 'woman's fiction'",[49] in which a heroine overcomes hardships by finding the necessary resources inside herself. But unlike "woman's fiction", "Incidents is an attempt to move women to political action", thus stepping out of the domestic sphere at that time commonly held to be the proper sphere for women and joining the public sphere.[52]
Jacobs discusses "the painful personal subject" of her sexual history "in order to politicize it, to insist that the forbidden topic of sexual abuse of slave women be included in public discussions of the slavery question." In telling of her daughter's acceptance of her sexual history, she "shows black women overcoming the divisive sexual ideology of the white patriarchy".[53]
