Such details as birth dates, family ties among slaves and parentage, which are basic for constructing an identity, were withheld from slaves in order to prevent them from establishing a sense of self that could lead to alliances or organized rebellions. This kind of ignorance of slaves was necessary for the maintenance of the slave owner's authority. The two authors differ from each other in this case because Jacobs has no problem with identifying herself, she knows her parentage and her age and even has childhood memories of her parents and family. Douglass however lacks this kind of information, he is not sure who his father was (he only knows that he was white), and his memories of his mother are vague. He mentions that "[a] want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me"(Douglass 310). Hence for Douglass the meaning of "knowledge" has to do with identification and literacy , but Jacobs refers to a totally different meaning of it. .
Jacobs's "knowledge" has to do with "premature knowledge" of sexual harassment because of sexual exploitation of enslaved African-American women, by their white masters. The dilemma of all enslaved women was the conflict between virtuous, womanly ideals and the sexual exploitation mentioned above. Hence, for the slave woman, race and gender meant double oppression. It was not enough that the produce of her labor was owned by her master but her body was his as well.Thus, Jacobs's narrative constructed it's own primary audience of white middle classed women from the North, who were considered the moral guardians of the nation and were horrified by slavery's threat to woman's virtue. "The Cult of True Womanhood" was an organization that dictated the moral codes for women's virtues and proper conduct, and women both in the North and in the South were judged upon its rules.
Jacobs starts her story and states in the preface that she wants to "arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered"(Jacobs XIV).