Frances Watkins Harper
By Nava Atlas | On | Comments (0)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911), also known as Frances Watkins Harper, combined her talents as
Frances Watkins Harper
By Nava Atlas | On | Comments (0)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911), also known as Frances Watkins Harper, combined her talents as a writer, poet, and public speaker with a deep commitment to abolition and social reform.
She sustained a long and prolific publishing career at a time when it was rare for women, particularly women of color, to have a voice. She used that voice in powerful ways, and as a result, she’s been referred to as “the mother of African-American journalism.”
The 1854 collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) was possibly her most successful, having gone through many editions. “The Two Offers” was the first published short story by an African-American woman. And Iola Leroy (1892) was one of the first novels by a black woman to be published.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins was the only child of free African American parents. Orphaned at age three, she was raised by Henrietta and Reverend William Watkins, her maternal aunt and uncle. Under their care, she attended the Academy for Negro Youth, a school run by Reverend Watkins, an active abolitionist. Quite likely, he was an inspiration for Frances’s later work.
At age 14, she went to work as a domestic and seamstress for a Quaker family, in whose home she had access to a wide array of literature.
Abolitionist, poet, essayist, and speaker
Frances launched her writing endeavors in the late 1830s, publishing essays in antislavery journals. Autumn Leaves, her first collection of poems, was published in 1845 when she was just twenty. This foray into print made her one of the first published African-American writers.
A great shift came in 1850 when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress. The new law made free blacks vulnerable to capture. Frances was compelled to move from Maryland to Ohio for her safety. The following year, she began helping escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, joining forces with William Still of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. At the same time, she continued to write regularly for anti-slavery newspapers.
After joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Frances embarked on another significant phase of her career as sought-after lecturer. As an effective orator, she spoke out against slavery, the subjugation of women, and other injustices.
A prolific pen dedicated to equality and justice
Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, first published in 1854, would go on to become one of Frances’s most successful titles, going through at least twenty printings. In her writings and speeches, she argued for equality and justice. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches intertwined as a body of work that sought justice and truth.
In 1858, one hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Frances Watkins refused to give up her seat in the white section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia. This incident inspired one of her most enduring poems, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” first published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle.
Among her other literary achievements was the publication of the 1859 short story “The Two Offers” (which you can read in full here). Its publication in Anglo-African Magazine, as noted in the introduction to this biography, made it the first short story published by an African-American woman.
In A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter writes of “The Two Offers” that it “contrasted the decision of two cousins, Laura and Janette, about whether to marry simply for the sake of avoiding spinsterhood, or to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose.”
Civil War years and beyond
In 1860, Frances married a widower named Fenton Harper, a farmer, and briefly retired from public speaking. The couple had one daughter, Mary. When her husband died four years later in 1864, Frances, now using the surname Harper, returned to the lecture circuit. She was left with their daughter and his three children from a previous marriage.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, Frances moved South and worked as a teacher for newly-freed black people. In her encounters with them, she learned firsthand of the hardships they endured during Reconstruction and expressed their stories through poems. These were eventually collected in her book Sketches of Southern Life (1872). She created a fictional ex-slave named Aunt Chloe to serve as a narrator in some of these touching works.
A famous poem, “The Slave Mother”
In her lifetime, Harper published 80 poems. “The Slave Mother” is one of her most famous, telling of the heart-wrenching separation of enslaved children from their mothers:
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.
Read the rest of “The Slave Mother” and several others in this selection of poems by Frances