Frances Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.

Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, Harper had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at the age of

20. At 67, she published her widely read novel Iola Leroy (1892), placing her among the first Black women to publish a novel.

As a young woman in 1850, Harper taught domestic science at Union Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, a school affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). In 1851, while living with the family of William Still, a clerk at the Pennsylvania Abolition Society who helped refugee slaves make their way along the Underground Railroad, Harper started to write anti-slavery literature. After joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Harper began her career as a public speaker and political activist.

Harper also had a successful literary career. Her collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) was a commercial success, making her the most popular African American poet before Paul Laurence Dunbar. 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 1886, she became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union. In 1896 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president.

Harper died at age 85 on February 22, 1911.

Early life and work

Frances Ellen Watkins was born free on September 24, 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland (then a slave state), 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 Reverend William J. Watkins, Sr., who gave her their last name.

Frances Watkins's uncle was the minister at the Sharp Street African Methodist Episcopal Church. Watkins was educated at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which her uncle had established in 1820. As a civil rights activist and abolitionist, Reverend Watkins was a major influence on his niece's life and work.

At 13, Watkins became employed as a seamstress and nursemaid for a white family that owned a bookshop. She stopped attending school but used her spare time to read from the books in the shop and work on her own writing.

In 1850, at age 26, Watkins moved from Baltimore to teach domestic science at Union Seminary, an AME-affiliated school for Black students near Columbus, Ohio. She worked as the school's first female teacher. 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 Reverend John Mifflin Brown, later a bishop in the AME Church. The following year Watkins took a position at a school in York, Pennsylvania.

Writing career

Harper's writing career started in 1839 when she published pieces in antislavery journals. Her politics and writing informed each other. Her writing career started 20 years before she was married, so several of her works were published under her maiden name of Watkins.

Harper published her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, or Autumn Leaves, in 1845 when she was 20 years old. This book marked her as an important abolitionist voice. 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 in the 2010s. Her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), was extremely popular. Over the next few years, it was reprinted several times.

In 1858, Harper refused to give up her seat or ride in the "colored" section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia (97 years before Rosa Parks). In the same year, she published her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" in The Anti-Slavery Bugle, which became one of her best known works.

In 1859, Harper's story "The Two Offers" was published in The Anglo-African Newspaper, making her the first Black woman to publish a short story. That same year, Anglo-African Magazine published her essay "Our Greatest Want," in which Harper 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.

Harper published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872. This anthology detailed her experience touring the Southern United States 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. Harper uses the figure of a former 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: Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph. Harper is also known for what was long considered her first novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, published as a book in 1892 when she was 67. This was one of the first books published by a Black woman in the United States. While using the conventions of the time, Harper 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.

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.

Gendered stereotypes of black womanhood

When Harper began giving antislavery lectures, the first of which took place in 1854, her gender attracted attention. The challenges she faced were not limited to racial prejudices, for in those days black women who spoke publicly about racial issues were still few in number and scientific racism was deeply intertwined with scientific sexism. It was taken by some as confirmation of gendered stereotypes about the differences between black women and white women, as in the scientific thinking of the day black women were cast as a Jezebel type, "governed almost entirely by her libido," drawing a stark contrast with the 19th century ideal of sexually pure white femininity.