Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) “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.”

A celebrated writer, political activist, and lecturer, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper is remembered for her legacy in the causes of “enslavement and abolitionism, human rights and dignity, women’s rights and equality, racial and social justice, lynching and mob violence, voting rights, moral character, racial self-help and uplift, and multiracial cooperation.”  She was aware of the impact of intersectionality far before it was a commonly used term.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland to free black parents and orphaned by age 3, Harper’s aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins, raised her. Her uncle was an outspoken abolitionist, practiced self-taught medicine, organized a black literary society and established his own school in 1820, Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, offering a “classical education”.  Harper attended and was able to take courses in Latin, Greek, and the Bible.

At age 13 Harper took a job as a nursemaid and seamstress for a white Quaker family that owned a bookshop. She was encouraged by her employers to pursue her interest in writing.  Over the years her poems were published in local newspapers.  At age 20 her first collection of works, Autumn Leaves, was published.

When she was twenty-six years old, now living on her own, Harper became the first woman instructor at Union Seminary, a school for free African Americans in Wilberforce, Ohio. Shortly after she began working as a teacher, her home state of Maryland passed a law stating that free African Americans living in the North were no longer allowed to enter the state of Maryland. If found, they would be imprisoned and sold into slavery. 

Harper was now unable to return to her own home. She decided to devote all of her efforts to the antislavery cause.  She worked alongside William Still, the Father of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad, helping escaped formerly enslaved people move into Canada.  She began writing poetry for antislavery newspapers. Her poem “Eliza Harris,” was published in The Liberator, and in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. By the time Harper left Philadelphia in 1854, she had compiled her second small volume of poetry called Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects with an introduction by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.  This became a commercial success, her earnings going primarily to free enslaved people.

Francis traveled United States and Canada as a lecturer speaking about racism, women’s oppression, and anti-slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War.  She began to publish novels, short stories, and poetry focused on issues of racism, feminism and classism. In 1859, Harper published a short story in the Anglo-African Magazine called “The Two Offers”, from which the quote above is taken.  This story about women’s education was the first short story published by an African American woman.

At age 35 Frances married Fenton Harper, a widower with 3 children, and they had a daughter.  After Fenton’s untimely death four years later, Francis continued speaking across the U.S. South, encouraging education for the formerly enslaved, supporting reconstruction and speaking out for suffrage for all women, black and white. In 1870, she moved to Philadelphia and joined the First Unitarian Church.  She continued her advocacy on behalf of women’s empowerment and in support of the 14th and 15th amendments, writing in magazines intended for both black and white popular audiences.