revenge on her tormentors or at least break free and flee to the north. Her solidarity with other women and with the slaves she left behind is evidenced by the writing of her story which aimed to help overthrow slavery. Always within her burned this powerful feminist sense of her own worth and the evils of slavery. After being raped by her "master," she thinks, "O, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be, if someday when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up, and disencumber the world of a plague" (352).
Of course, when Brent had her own children, she took a "conventional" attitude toward them in terms of saving them from slavery, but the conventionality of her maternal instincts was at no time passive or submissive. She planned every day and night how to save them and herself from slavery, not waiting for a man to ride to the rescue. She was willing to do wha
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