The female "tragic octoroon" was a stock character of abolitionist literature: a light-skinned woman raised in her father's household as though she were white, until his bankruptcy or death reduces her to a menial position and she is eventually sold.
[3] This character allowed abolitionists to draw attention to the sexual exploitation in slavery; and unlike the suffering of the field hands, did not allow slaveholders to retort that the sufferings of Northern mill hands were no easier, since the Northern mill owner would not sell his own children into slavery.
[4] The "tragic mulatta" figure is a woman of biracial heritage who endures the hardships of Africans in the Antebellum South, even though she may look white enough that her ethnicity is not immediately obvious.
Lydia Maria Child's 1842 short story "The Quadroons" is generally credited as the first work of literature to feature a tragic mulatta,[1] to garner support for emancipation and equal rights.
[1] Writer Eva Allegra Raimon notes that Child "allowed white readers to identify with the victim by gender while distancing themselves by race and thus to avoid confronting a racial ideology that denies the full humanity of nonwhite women."