. In no other chapter than Chapter 10, “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life,” is it more evident how radically different Jacobs’s experiences as a slave were from Douglass’s. Abolitionists had been reading Douglass’s tale of heroic self-sufficiency for 15 years when Jacobs published her narrative, and the things that she recounts having to do to protect her life (and her virtue) from her abusive master did not map at all well onto the model that Douglass had established. For Douglass, freedom was something you claimed through direct action: by acquiring literacy; by fighting back against a cruel overseer; or by running away to the North. For Jacobs, however, freedom from sexual harassment at the hands of her master came by willingly entering into a sexual relationship with another white man who was not her master. Jacobs feels compelled to justify her actions to her readers. Do her actions make sense to readers today? Do we judge Jacobs by different standards? Do we think that she made a good decision, or, at the very least, the best one she could considering the options that were available to her? Jacobs faces a considerable challenge in that she is arguing that slavery is unequivocally wrong even though she gives herself permission to be a moral relativist when it comes to her own sexual virtue. How do you imagine that nineteenth-century readers would have responded to this? How do you respond today? Did Douglass ever have to plead for special consideration when explaining the choices he made? Is Jacobs subjected to an unfair double standard because she is a woman?