Background

Frances Harper was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of free parents.

Education

She was raised there by an aunt and uncle after being orphaned at an early age. She attended a private school run by her uncle until she was 13.

Career

Then she went to work as a housekeeper for a family that owned a bookstore. Harper's employer encouraged her to spend her free time reading and writing, and before long the young woman was composing her first poems and essays. Her first book, Forest Leaves (also known as Autumn Leaves), a compilation of poetry and prose, was published about 1845.

After leaving Maryland in 1850, Harper taught school for a while in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was in Pennsylvania that she became active in the Underground Railroad. She also launched her career as an antislavery lecturer during this period, traveling extensively throughout New England, New York, Ohio, and eastern Canada to speak as often as three or four times a day. On May 13, 1857, for example, she addressed the New York Antislavery Society. In an excerpt of what is believed to be the only surviving example of one of Harper's antislavery lectures, as quoted from Outspoken Women: Speeches by American Women Reformers, 1635-1935, Harper called for an end to slavery.

The 1850s proved to be a productive time for Harper, and in addition to her public speaking engagements, she also published several volumes of poetry. In much of her writing, Harper argued for social change and in support of her beliefs. One of her most critically acclaimed works, the abolitionist poem "Bury Me in a Free Land, " was published in 1854 in her popular book Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. This collection saw print in over 20 editions.

In 1860, after the marriage, she briefly retired from public speaking. After her husband's death in 1864, Harper returned to the lecture circuit. She also published what many critics believed to be her best work, Moses: A Story of the Nile, a collection of poems and an essay, under the name Mrs. F. E. W. Harper around this time. An extended biblical allegory written in blank verse and lacking overt racial references, Moses tells the story of the Hebrew patriarch by focusing on his self-sacrifice and leadership skills.

After the American Civil War, Harper continued to lecture on behalf of the women's movement and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Her top priority, however, was the race issue; while on a lengthy tour across the South during the late 1860s and early 1870s, she saw firsthand that former slaves endured conditions nearly as intolerable as those that had existed before the war. (And as lynchings and other forms of racial intimidation became more commonplace, the lives of Southern blacks took on an increased sense of desperation. ) Consequently, like many of her fellow black activists, she felt that securing rights for women could wait until African Americans were guaranteed certain basic freedoms. Harper addressed this very topic on February 23, 1891, at a meeting of the National Council of Women. Her remarks were originally published in 1891 in Transactions and later reprinted in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings.

At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Harper delivered a speech entitled "Women's Political Future. " In this presentation, she reiterated her belief in the ability of women to exert a strong moral force for social change. Her address was published in May Wright Sewall's 1894 book entitled The World's Congress of Representative Women.

Harper also presented her ideas on suffrage in this speech, favoring an educated voter of either sex over the then-current system of only men being allowed to vote in the United States.

Frances Harper continued to write and lecture for social reform until her death on February 22, 1911, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Among the notable posts she held during her life included director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, executive member of the National Women's Christian Temperance Union, and founding member and vice-president of the National Association of Colored Women.

Achievements

• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a notable voice in social reform in the nineteenth century, who captivated black and white audiences alike with dramatic recitations of her antislavery and social reform verse.
  
  Numerous African-American women's service clubs are named in her honor. Across the nation, in cities such as St. Louis, St. Paul, and Pittsburgh, F. E. W. Harper Leagues and Frances E. Harper Women's Christian Temperance Unions thrived well into the twentieth century.
  
  A women's honors dormitory named for her and Harriet Tubman at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, is commonly referred to as Harper-Tubman, or simply Harper.

Works

More photos

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  • The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

    (An internationally respected neurologist offers a revolut...)

  • Iola Leroy: Includes MLA Style Citations for Scholarly Secondary Sources, Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Critical Essays (Squid Ink Classics)

    (Having trouble finding scholarly sources for your researc...)

  • Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)

    (Frances Harper was renowned in her lifetime not only as a...)

  • Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (Dover Books on Literature & Drama)

    ( The daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter, Iola Ler...)

  • Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels, Frances E. W. Harper (Black Women Writers Series)

    (Edited by Frances Smith Foster Winner of the College Lan...)

  • Trial and Triumph

    (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an African-American abol...)

  • Minnie's Sacrifice

    (Minnie's Sacrifice By Frances Ellen Watkins Harper)

  • Collected Works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

    (Poems and Trial and Triumph)

  • Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Classic Reprint)

    (Mrs. Harper was about to write a story on some features o...)

Views

Quotations: "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. "

"Slavery is dead, but the spirit which animated it still lives. "

"The true aim of female education should be, not a development of one or two, but all the faculties of the human soul, because no perfect womanhood is developed by imperfect culture. "

Membership

Frances Harper was an executive member of the National Women's Christian Temperance Union, and a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women.

Connections

In 1860, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper married Fenton Harper, a farmer. The couple had one daughter, Mary.

Daughter:

Mary Frances Harper

husband:

Fenton Harper

References

• Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal
• Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings
• African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927 (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Civil War Songs and Poems
• Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (African American Life Series)
• Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration: Poems and Photographs, Past and Present
• Heads of the Colored People: Stories
• All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
• The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation