Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 1825–1911

Poet, writer, lecturer, activist

Privileged Upbringing Did Not Stave Off Loneliness

Lectured in Support of Antislavery Movement

Pioneering Use of Dialect and Folk Characters

Challenged Racism of Fellow Suffragettes

Selected writings

Sources

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the most popular black poet of her day. She was known internationally during the mid-to late 1800s as a poet, writer, lecturer, abolitionist, and proponent of temperance and women’s rights. Although she was a highly sought after speaker and a best-selling author, her works fell into obscurity after her death in 1911. In the introduction to her book ”A Brighter Coming Day,” Harper scholar Frances S. Foster suggests that racism and sexism—specifically as they manifested themselves in attitudes toward the emancipation of blacks and the suffragette movement of the turn of the century—kept Harper out of America’s literary canon.

Frances Ellen Watkins was born to free parents in the slave city of Baltimore, Maryland, on September 24, 1825. By the time she was three both of her parents had died. She was subsequently taken in by an aunt and uncle active in the antislavery movement. Although living free among slaves was not easy, Harper was extremely privileged for her time. She attended the school founded by her uncle, the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. The school’s emphasis on bible studies, public speaking, and classic literature, as well as an encouragement of political leadership and social service work for its graduates strongly influenced the young girl.

Privileged Upbringing Did Not Stave Off Loneliness

Apparently, Harper was a lonely child. Foster quotes a letter Harper wrote to a friend in which she laments, “Have I yearned for a mother’s love? The grave was my robber. Before three years had scattered their blight around my path, death had won my mother from me. Would the strong arm of a brother have been welcome? I was my mother’s only child. “As a youth she was considered industrious and intelligent, often given to movements of quiet reflection. She was also profoundly affected by her school’s abolitionist teachings.

When she was 14 years old it became necessary for Harper to seek employment. She had already established a reputation as a writer and scholar, and she had enjoyed an education as good or better than that of most women of the period—regardless of class or color. Nonetheless, the best job she could find was as a housekeeper, seamstress, and babysitter for a family

At a Glance…

Born September 24,1825, in Baltimore, MD; died of a heart ailment, February 20, 1911; married Fenton Harper, 1860; children; Mary.

Began writing essays and poems in her early teens; worked as housekeeper, seamstress, and babysitter, c 1839; taught school in various cities, c. 1850–54; first lectured on abolitionism, 1854; published first volume of poetry, Forest Leaves, c. 1845; gained widespread recognition with Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, 1854; published first short story, “The Two Offers/1859; published novel loia Leroy, 1892; superintendent of the Colored Branch of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Chapters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1875–82; directed Northern United States Temperance Union, 1883–90. Lectured extensively on abolitionism, temperance, and equal rights for women and African Americans, 1854-c 1900.

who owned a bookstore. She spent her spare time reading in order to further her education. By that time she had written an essay and composed several poems.

In 1850 Harper’s uncle closed his school and moved to Canada. Baltimore had become a dangerous place for free blacks, so Harper moved to Ohio, where she taught at the African Methodist Episcopal’s (AME) Union Seminary near Columbus. The seminary eventually became part of Wilberforce University. Harper was the first woman faculty member there; she taught what was then called domestic science, essentially housekeeping skills.

In 1852 Harper moved to Little York, Pennsylvania, to teach a class of what she called “fifty-three untrained little urchins,” according to Ann Shockley in Afro-American Women Writers.But she soon quit that miserable job. She found herself increasingly depressed due to a combination of outrage at slavery and longing for Baltimore. The latter was intensified in 1853 when it became impossible for her to return to the city of her youth. Maryland had passed a law forbidding free blacks from entering the state—going back would have meant imprisonment or enslavement. For the next several years Harper moved frequently, devoting herself to the abolitionist cause. In 1853 she relocated to Philadelphia, where she lived with the family of William Still, whose house was the main stop on the Philadelphia portion of the Underground Railroad. The “railroad” was a secret network of hiding places where escaped slaves were aided in their escape to freedom in Canada.

Lectured in Support of Antislavery Movement

Harper spent much of her time traveling to antislavery offices in Philadelphia, Boston, and New Bedford, New Hampshire, learning the abolition movement’s theories and practices. She gave her first speech in 1854 in New Bedford. She was so incensed by the horrors of slavery that she became a permanent lecturer for the Maine Anti-slavery Society. Harper traveled throughout New England, southern Canada, and parts of the Midwest speaking on antislavery and civil rights. She would frequently give three lectures in a day. She was an excellent speaker, described as fiery yet dignified. Some people were so impressed, but still so stubborn in their racist convictions, that they insisted Harper could not be genuine. “You would be amused,” she wrote to a friend, as quoted in Hallie Q. Brown’s Homespun Heroines and other Women of Distinction, “to hear some of the remarks which my lectures call forth. ’She is a man.’ ’She is not colored, she is white. She is painted.’”

Harper’s poetry was often interspersed throughout her lectures. She also began publishing poems regularly in newspapers and magazines, gaining a national reputation in the process. She had published her first volume of poetry in Baltimore around 1845 when she was just 21 years old. Copies of this small collection, entitled Forest Leaves —also published as Autumn Leaves — have long since disappeared. The book that truly launched her literary career, however, was Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, printed in both Philadelphia and Boston in 1854. It contained a preface by well-known abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The book’s success was prodigious; it sold over 10,000 copies in three years and was enlarged and reissued in 1857 and reprinted again in 1858, 1864, and 1871, making Harper the most popular black American poet of the time.

It is not surprising that Harper is most often referred to as an abolitionist poet, but her volumes of poetry actually contained works on a variety of topics, including religion, heroism, women’s rights, black achievement, and temperance. Her poems also took the form of responses to contemporary writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens, new readings of bible stories, and commentaries on current events. In 1859 Harper became the first black American woman to publish a short story when “The Two Offers” was published in the Anglo-African.

Harper married Fenton Harper, a young widower with three children, on November 22, 1860, in Cincinnati. Savings from lectures and book sales allowed her to buy a farm outside of Columbus, where she and her husband set up house. They had one child together, a daughter named Mary. The responsibilities of married life and family allowed Harper little time to write or lecture, but she continued to speak out against the atrocities of slavery and published occasionally during the Civil War.

Fenton Harper died during the spring of 1864, which sent Frances immediately back out on the lecture circuit, where she began advocating equal rights for the newly emancipated slaves. In 1867 she financed her own speaking tour and from 1867 through 1871 she lectured daily throughout the North and war-torn South. She worked hard for the Reconstruction effort, espousing the necessity of racial uplift, moral reform, and women’s rights. Among the titles of her speeches were “Enlightened Motherhood,” “Racial Literature,” and “The Demands of the Colored Race in the Work of Reconstruction.” As women’s clubs became popular, Harper became a favorite speaker on the women’s movement

Pioneering Use of Dialect and Folk Characters

During this period Harper tried her hand at her most experimental writing. In 1869 the Christian Recorder published her serialized novella, ”Minnie’s Sacrifice.” That year she also published “Moses: A Story of the Nile,” an extended dramatic poem retelling the bible story of the Hebrews’ enslavement in Egypt and their subsequent exodus to the promised land. Still, many critics consider Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life her most inventive and best literary piece. Published in 1872, it is comprised of a series of poems by “Aunt Chloe” telling stories of slavery and reconstruction. It is considered a pioneering effort in its use of African American dialect and folk characters. Harper’s more innovative works did not replace her lyrical balladry, however; in 1871, while arranging for the twentieth edition of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, Harper published Poems, her first new volume of verse in over ten years.

From 1875 to 1882 Harper served as superintendent of the Colored Branch of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Chapters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Although she had recently purchased a home in Philadelphia, she was rarely there as demands for her speech-making talents grew. Her daughter, Mary, who never married and was extremely close to her mother, often traveled with her.

Harper developed Sunday schools and YMCAs in the black community, as well as helping to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents and working for the security of the aged. In 1873 she wrote a series of pieces entitled “Fancy Etchings” for theChristian Reader, the characters in which discuss current events and various issues supported by Harper. From 1883 to 1890 she directed the Northern United States Temperance Union.

Challenged Racism of Fellow Suffragettes

Three years later Harper joined with colleagues Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Sarah J. Earley, and Hallie Q. Brown to charge the international gathering of women assembled at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago with racism. The attitudes of celebrated suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and other white feminists who made racist remarks about black men was something black feminists would not tolerate. They had depended on the suffrage movement to represent black women as well, but they ultimately realized that they would be forced to organize separately. Harper became the vice-president of the group she helped to form, the National Association of Colored Women.

Still, though the Fifteenth Amendment, which would allow blacks the right to vote, did not include women, Harper pushed to have it passed. When forced to choose, she felt that rights for black Americans were more important than rights for women and that if any black person could progress, she would encourage the effort. Harper insisted in her lectures that the burdens of one group were the burdens of all. In a poem entitled “The Burdens of All” she wrote, “The burdens will always be heavy/The sunshine fade into night/Till mercy and justice shall cement/The black, the brown and the white.” Neither an advocate of assimilation nor of separatism, Harper championed the value of education in achieving change and did not condone violence.

In 1892 Harper published her only novel; she was just the second African American woman to boast such an accomplishment, lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted tells the story of a young woman growing up in post-Civil War America, when women were subjugated and African Americans were restricted and abused despite their freedom. Publishers Weekly called it “a classic of 19th century African-American women’s fiction.” The book was well received and reached a wide audience. But Iola Leroy would be Harper’s last long literary project (most volumes published later were rearrangements of already published work with some previously uncollected writings added). Toward the end of her life Harper was often ill; she therefore traveled and published less frequently. Mary Harper died in 1909. Constant offers of help were forwarded, but Harper had always been independent and would remain so. She died of a heart ailment on February 20, 1911, at the age of 87.

In Library Journal’s review of Frances Foster’s ”A Brighter Coming Day,” Veronica Mitchell noted that “Harper was the most popular African-American poet of her time; the first paid black abolitionist lecturer and short story writer; the first to experiment with dialect in the speech of her characters to express the sensibilities of the oppressed; and the first to develop heroic black characters.” In 1994 Foster edited Minnie’s Sacrifice; Sowing and Reaping; Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (though the three titular works are generally considered novellas, not novels). Metro Times Literary Quarterly contributor Kierna Mayo Dawsey called the trio “buried treasures,” remarking on Foster’s “tremendous contribution … in searching for and reprinting Harper’s works.”

Dawsey pointed out that “[Harper’s] accomplishments as a writer and speaker dedicated to abolition, women’s rights and religion earned her national recognition, but ironically did not prevent a significant portion of her work from being lost and forgotten upon her death.” It wasn’t until the end of the twentieth century, when the contributions of Africa American women to the literary canon began to be studied in earnest that Harper’s rightful place among major writers of the nineteenth century commenced to reassert itself. Frances E. W. Harper would have been considered exemplary in any century, but to accomplish what she did during a time when both blacks and women were institutionally oppressed is truly remarkable.

Selected writings

Forest Leaves (also published as Autumn Leaves), c.1845.

Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, 1854.

“The Two Offers,” 1859.

Moses: A Story of the Nile, 1869.

”Minnie’s Sacrifice,” 1869.

Poems, 1871.

Sketches of Southern Life, 1872.

“Fancy Etchings,” 1873.

“Fancy Sketches,” 1874.

“Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story,” 1876–77 (serialized).

“Trial and Triumph,” 1888-89 (serialized). “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Colored Woman,” 1888.

lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, 1892.

The Sparrow’s Fall and Other Poems, c. 1894.

Atlanta Offering: Poems, 1895.

Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems, c. 1895. Poems, 1900.

Light beyond the Darkness.

Sources

Books

Baym, Nina, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870, Cor nell University Press, 1978.

“A Brighter Coming Day”: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster,Feminist Press, 1990.

Brown, Hallie Q., Homespun Heroines and Other

Women of Distinction, Aldine Publishing Co., 1926,pp. 97–103.

Carby, Hazel, in the introduction tolola Leroy, edited by Deborah E. McDowell, Beacon Press, 1987, pp. 1–20.

Carby, Hazel, in the introduction Womanhood: TheEmer gence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, 1987.

Cavalcade: Negro American Writing from 1760 to the Present, edited by Arthur P. Davis and J. Saun ders Redding, Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Christian, Barbara, Black Woman Novelists: The De velopment of a Tradition, 1892-1976, 1980.

Foster, Frances Smith, in the introduction iolola Leroy, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Oxford University Press, 1988.

Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960, edited by Mary Helen Washington, 1988.

Notable Black American Women, Gale, 1992.

Lerner, Gerda, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, 1973.

Montgomery, J. W., A Comparative Analysis of the Rhetoric of Two Negro Women Orators — Sojourner Truth and F. E. W. Harper, 1968.

Redding, J. Saunders, To Make a Poet Black, 1939.

Robinson, W. H. .Early Black American Poets, 1971.

Sherman, Joan R. .Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edition, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 62–74.

Shockley, Ann Allen, Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933, G. K. Hall, 1988, pp. 56–61.

Sillen, S., Women against Slavery, 1955.

Still, William G., in the introduction to the second edition of loia Leroy, Garigues Brothers, 1892.

Still, William G., The Underground Railroad, 1872. Williams, Kenny J., They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 1970.

Periodicals

American Visions, October 1994, p. 38.

Boston Globe, August 30, 1994, p. 34.

Library Journal, March 15, 1990, p. 90.

Metro Times Literary Quarterly, February 15, 1995, p. 6.

New Literary History, Winter 1987.

New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1990,p. 38.

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,January 1989.

Publishers Weekly, May 16, 1994, p. 52.

—Joanna Rubiner