Frances Harper


Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer, one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.
Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, she had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at the age of 20. At 67, she published her novel Iola Leroy, which was widely praised.
As a young woman in 1850, she taught sewing at Union Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, a school affiliated with the AME Church. In 1851, alongside William Still, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, she helped refugee slaves make their way along the Underground Railroad on their way to Canada. In 1853 she began her career as a public speaker and political activist after joining the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Her collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects became her biggest commercial success. Her short story "Two Offers" was published in the Anglo-African in 1859, making literary history as the first short story published by a black woman.
Harper founded, supported, and held high office in several national progressive organizations. In 1883 she became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union. In 1894 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president. Harper died aged 85 on February 22, 1911, nine years before women gained the right to vote.

Life and works

Early life and education

Frances Ellen Watkins was born free in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of free parents. Her parents, whose names are unknown, both died in 1828, making Watkins an orphan at the age of three. She was raised by her maternal aunt and uncle, Henrietta and Rev. William Watkins, who gave her their last name.
Frances Watkins' uncle was the minister at the Sharp Street African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was educated at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which he had established in 1820. As a civil rights activist and abolitionist, Rev. Watkins was a major influence on his niece's life and work.

Working life

At 13, Watkins found work as a seamstress. She also worked as a nursemaid for a white family who owned a bookshop. She was able to use her spare time to read from the books in the shop and work on her own writing. By the age of 21, she published Forest Leaves, a book of her collected poetry. This work was considered lost but was rediscovered by doctoral student Johanna Ortner at the Maryland Historical Society in the 2010s.
When she was 26, Harper moved from Baltimore to teach domestic science at Union Seminary, an AME-affiliated school for black students near Columbus, Ohio. The following year she took a position at a school in York, Pennsylvania.

Writing career

Her writing career started in 1839 when she published pieces in antislavery journals. Her politics and writing informed each other, including in her writing. Her writing career started long before she was married, 20 years to be exact, so several of her works were published under her maiden name of Watkins.
She published her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, or Autumn Leaves, in 1845 when she was 20 years old. A single copy of this volume, long lost, was rediscovered in the early 21st century by scholar Johanna Ortner in Baltimore, at the Maryland Historical Society. Her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, was extremely popular. Over the next few years, it was reprinted numerous times.
In 1859, her story "The Two Offers" was published in Anglo-African Magazine; she was the first Black woman to publish a short story. That same year Anglo-African Magazine published her essay "Our Greatest Want," in which she linked the common religious trope of oppression of African Americans to the oppression of the Hebrew people while enslaved in Egypt. Anglo-African Magazine and the weekly Anglo-African newspaper were both Civil War-era periodicals that served as a forum for debate among abolitionists and scholars.
Harper published 80 poems. In her poem "The Slave Mother", she writes: "He is not hers, although she bore / For him a mother's pains; / He is not hers, although her blood / Is coursing through his veins! / He is not hers, for cruel hands / May rudely tear apart / The only wreath of household love / That binds her breaking heart." Throughout the two stanzas, Harper demonstrates the restricted relationship between an enslaved mother and her child, while including themes of family, motherhood, humanity and slavery. Another of her poems, "To the Cleveland Union Savers," published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle of Feb. 23, 1861, champions Sara Lucy Bagby, the last person in the United States to be returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law.
She published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872. It detailed her experience touring the South and meeting newly freed Black people. In these poems she described the harsh living conditions faced by a black woman during both slavery and the Reconstruction era. After the Civil War, she continued to fight for the rights of women and African Americans and was involved in many other social causes. She uses the figure of an ex-slave, called Aunt Chloe, as a narrator in several of these sketches.
From 1868 to 1888, Harper had three novels serialized in a Christian magazine. But she was better known for what was long considered her first novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, published as a book when she was 67. While using the conventions of the time, she dealt with serious social issues, including education for women, the social passing as white of mixed-race people, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, temperance, and social responsibility.

Teaching and public activism

In 1850, Watkins moved to Ohio, where she worked as the first female teacher at Union Seminary, established by the Ohio Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Union closed in 1863 when the AME Church diverted its funds to purchase Wilberforce University, the first black-owned and operated college. The school in Wilberforce was run by the Rev. John Mifflin Brown, later a bishop in the AME Church. After teaching for two years, she left to take a teaching position in Little York, Pennsylvania.
In 1853, Watkins joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and became a traveling lecturer for the group. In 1854, Watkins delivered her first anti-slavery speech on "Education and the Elevation of Colored Race." The success of this speech resulted in a two-year lecture tour in Maine for the Anti-Slavery Society. She recalled New England warmly: "Dear old New England! It was there kindness encompassed my path; it was there kind voices made their music in my ear. The home of my childhood, the burial-place of my kindred, is not as dear to me as New England." She continued to travel, lecturing throughout the East and Midwest from 1856 to 1860.
After the Civil War ended in 1865 she moved south to teach newly freed black people during the Reconstruction. During this time she also gave many large public speeches.

Progressive causes

Frances Watkins Harper was a strong supporter of abolitionism, prohibition and woman's suffrage, progressive causes that were connected before and after the American Civil War. She was also active in the Unitarian Church, which supported abolitionism. Harper wrote to John Brown after he had been arrested and before his execution: "I thank you that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race; I hope from your sad fate great good may arise to the cause of freedom."
In 1858 she refused to give up her seat or ride in the "colored" section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia. She published her poem, "Bury Me in a Free Land," in The Anti-Slavery Bugle and it became one of her best known works. She traveled on a lecture tour and often read her poetry at these public meetings.
In 1866, Harper gave a moving speech before the National Women's Rights Convention, demanding equal rights for all, including Black women. She stated:
"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro...You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me...While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America."
This speech had repercussions throughout the woman's suffrage movement and displayed black suffragists desire for equality not just with white men, but also white women. Harper's commitment to equal rights also led her to help found the American Woman Suffrage Association and reject the racist comments of fellow suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who did not support the Fifteenth Amendment's aim of enfranchising black men without extending the right of suffrage to women.
During the Reconstruction Era, in 1870 she worked with the Freedmen's Bureau encouraging many freedmen in Mobile Alabama, to "get land, everyone that can" so they could vote and act independently once Congress passed the Fifteenth amendment.
Harper was active in the growing number of Black organizations and came to believe that Black reformers had to be able to set their own priorities. From 1883 to 1890, she helped organize events and programs for the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She had worked with members of the original WCTU, because "it was the most important women's organization to push for expanding federal power." In her role as superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania WCTU, Harper facilitated both access and independent organizing for black women, promoting the collective action of all women as a matter of both justice and morality. "Activists like Harper and Frances Willard campaigned not only for racial and sexual equality but also for a new understanding of the federal government's responsibility to protect rights, regulate morality, and promote social welfare". Harper was a friend and mentor to many other African American writers and journalists, including Mary Shadd Cary, Ida B. Wells, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Kate D. Chapman.
Harper was disappointed when Willard gave priority to white women's concerns, rather than support Black women's goals of gaining federal support for an anti-lynching law, defense of black rights, or abolition of the convict lease system. Together with Mary Church Terrell, Harper helped organize the National Association of Colored Women in 1894, and was elected vice president in 1897.

Personal life

In 1860, Frances Watkins married a widower named Fenton Harper. They had a daughter together, named Mary Frances Harper, and he had three children from a previous marriage. When he died four years later, the widow Harper was left with all four children to care for and support. She continued to live in Philadelphia for the rest of her life.
Frances Harper died of heart failure on February 22, 1911, at the age of 86. Her funeral service was held at the Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. She was buried in Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, next to her daughter, Mary, who had died two years before.

Selected works

In addition, the following three novels were originally published in serial form in the Christian Recorder between 1868 and 1888: