Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the most widely read Black poet of the nineteenth century and one of its most traveled public speakers. From the antislavery platform of the 1850s through Reconstruction lecture tours of the South to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, she argued in verse, fiction, and speech that freedom for Black Americans and rights for women could not be separated.
At a Glance
- Born
- 24 September 1825, Baltimore, Maryland
- Died
- 22 February 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Birth name
- Frances Ellen Watkins
- Known for
- Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854); “The Two Offers” (1859); Sketches of Southern Life (1872); Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892)
- HBCU ties
- Wilberforce University (First woman instructor at Union Seminary (c. 1850), an AME school whose work was later absorbed by Wilberforce University)
- Fields
- Literature · Abolition · Civil Rights
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Frances Ellen Watkins was born free in Baltimore, Maryland, on 24 September 1825, the only child of free Black parents. Her mother died when she was about three, and she was raised by her aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins. William Watkins was a minister, abolitionist, and teacher who ran the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, where she studied until she was about thirteen, receiving a rigorous education in the Bible, classics, and elocution.
She then went to work as a nursemaid and seamstress for a Baltimore family who owned a bookshop, and she read widely in her spare hours. Her first collection of poems, Forest Leaves, appeared around 1845, when she was about twenty-one; for generations no copy was known, and it was treated as lost until a copy was identified in the twenty-first century.
Life and Work
About 1850 Watkins left Maryland to become the first woman instructor at Union Seminary, an African Methodist Episcopal school in Ohio whose work was later absorbed by Wilberforce University; she taught sewing and domestic science. She then taught in York, Pennsylvania. In 1853 Maryland enacted a law under which free Black people who entered the state could be seized and sold into slavery, which made her return home impossible. She settled in Philadelphia, lived for a time with William and Letitia Still, and saw at first hand the work of the city’s Vigilance Committee aiding people who had escaped slavery.
In 1854 she published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, with a preface by William Lloyd Garrison. Poems such as “Eliza Harris”, which drew on the escape across the ice in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and “The Slave Mother” reached a wide audience through the antislavery press, and the book went through several editions. The same year a public address on the education of Black people led to her engagement as a lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society, and she spent the rest of the decade speaking across New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada. In 1859 the Anglo-African Magazine published her story “The Two Offers”, widely described as the first short story published by an African American woman.
On 22 November 1860 she married Fenton Harper, a widower, and they settled on a farm in Ohio, where their daughter, Mary, was born. When he died in 1864, she was left with debts and returned to the lecture circuit. After the war she toured the former Confederate states for several years, speaking to Black and white audiences, often in churches and schoolhouses, about education, thrift, and the protection of Black women. In May 1866 she addressed the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York with the speech known as “We Are All Bound Up Together”, telling white suffragists that Black women faced wrongs their movement ignored. When the movement split over the Fifteenth Amendment, she supported ratification of Black men’s voting rights.
Her writing in these years turned to Reconstruction itself. Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869) retold the Exodus as an allegory of leadership, and her novel Minnie’s Sacrifice was serialized in the Christian Recorder in 1869. Sketches of Southern Life (1872) introduced Aunt Chloe, a formerly enslaved woman who narrates, in her own voice, learning to read, building a church, and judging the politicians who sought freedmen’s votes.
Harper was also a leader in the temperance movement, which she saw as a defense of Black families. In 1883 she was named superintendent of work among Black people for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s northern branch, working within an organization whose leaders often deferred to white Southern members on questions of race. Two more serialized novels, Sowing and Reaping and Trial and Triumph, appeared in the Christian Recorder in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1892 she published Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, a novel following a woman raised as white who learns of her Black ancestry and chooses to work for her people after the Civil War. In 1896 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as one of its vice presidents.
“You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.”
Legacy
Harper died in Philadelphia on 22 February 1911 and is buried in Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania. For much of the twentieth century critics dismissed her work as sentimental, but scholars since the 1970s have restored her to the center of African American literary history, recovering serialized novels that had been forgotten and reading her Aunt Chloe poems as early achievements in Black vernacular voice.
Her career joined causes that later movements often treated separately: abolition, Black education, temperance, and the rights of women. Historians of suffrage now cite her 1866 speech as an early statement of the argument that race and sex together shaped Black women’s position, and her insistence that Black women speak for themselves anticipated the club movement she helped build.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper used poetry, fiction, and public speech to argue that freedom for Black Americans and rights for women could not be separated. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 24 September 1825 Born free in Baltimore, Maryland.
- c. 1845 Publishes her first collection, Forest Leaves.
- c. 1850 Becomes the first woman instructor at Union Seminary in Ohio.
- 1854 Publishes Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects; begins lecturing for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society.
- 1859 Publishes “The Two Offers” in the Anglo-African Magazine.
- 22 November 1860 Marries Fenton Harper.
- May 1866 Delivers “We Are All Bound Up Together” at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York.
- 1872 Publishes Sketches of Southern Life.
- 1892 Publishes Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted.
- 22 February 1911 Dies in Philadelphia.
Sources and Further Reading
- National Women’s History Museum, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” Link
- Academy of American Poets, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” Link
- Colored Conventions Project, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” Link
- Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Philadelphia: Garrigues Brothers, 1892).
- Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1990).
- Frances Smith Foster, ed., Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
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