Jean Fagan Yellin

She was married to Ed Yellin and together, they published a memoir entitled In Contempt, Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC,[2][3][4] which documented the effect upon their lives of his legal battle for First Amendment rights, even after he had been exonerated by the Supreme Court of the United States.

[8] Prior to Yellin's work in the 1970s-1980s, the accepted academic opinion, voiced by such historians as John Blassingame, was that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a fictional novel written by Lydia Maria Child.

While re-reading Incidents in the 1970s as part of a project to educate herself in the use of gender as a category of analysis, Yellin became interested in the question of the text's true authorship.

At the suggestion of historian Herbert Gutman, she contacted Harvard University Press regarding publication, and her edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1987 with the endorsement of Professor John Blassingame.

[9] After the publication of Incidents, Yellin engaged in further research which revealed that Jacobs had been well-known in her own time and was very involved in the abolitionist and feminist movements and in relief and education efforts in the South during and after the Civil War.