|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper September 24, 1825-February 22, 1911
Ethnicity: African American Birth Date: September 24, 1825 Death Date: February 22, 1911 Genre(s): POETRY; NOVELS Table of Contents: Biographical and Critical EssayJump to Additional DLB Essay(s) on This Author: American Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920 WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
Books
Other
Periodical Publications
Papers: The largest collections of Harper's books and pamphlets are housed at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C., and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. Known as the "Bronze Muse" to her broad audience, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the major black woman poet of the nineteenth century. She achieved high distinction and great popularity as an antislavery orator and poet who turned to the causes of temperance and woman suffrage after the Civil War. A trained seamstress, Harper gave up an early career in the domestic arts, choosing instead to earn her living as a public lecturer, which she did until she was nearly eighty, when she officially retired. Her significance lies in her involvement in the major movements of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, and her writing resonates with the social, moral, political, and racial causes to which she dedicated herself. Harper was a remarkably independent woman and an ambitious writer of poetry and fiction; she wrote Iola Leroy (1892), the second of a handful of novels written by American black women in the nineteenth century, and "The Two Offers" (1859), probably the first short story published by an Afro-American female writer. An accessible and popular author, Harper read from and sold her collections at public gatherings, a practice which was common among activist writers in her day. Her works, especially Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) and Sketches of Southern Life (1872), were consistently reprinted during her lifetime, and her essays and articles appeared frequently in journals and periodicals of the late nineteenth century. When she died, however, her collections went out of print and her importance as one of the chief advocates for the rights of blacks and women at national and international conferences was just beginning to be recognized. The only child of free black parents in the slave state of Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins was born in Baltimore, probably in 1825, although the records on file at the Pennsylvania Department of Health give 1824 as the year of her birth. When her mother died, Frances was three or four years of age; she went to live with her aunt and attended the school for free blacks that was owned by her uncle, William J. Watkins, a self-educated minister and craftsman and a firm abolitionist whose writings appeared frequently in the Liberator. After she had completed her early education, she found a position in a Baltimore bookshop, which made available to her all of the popular literature of the period. She took full advantage of her position and read widely, preparing herself for her career as a writer and social reformer. As was the custom for young working women of the time, the teenaged Frances roomed with a Baltimore family who trained her in the domestic arts and strongly encouraged her reading and writing. She came to be considered well educated for a nineteenth-century black woman. Although the date cannot be verified, Frances Ellen Watkins published her first volume of poetry in about 1845. No copies of Forest Leaves have been found, but there are several references to it in early historical documents and there are indications that Underground Railroad agent William Grant Still, who became Watkins's longtime correspondent and friend, had assisted her in circulating a published volume before 1854. The widely circulated 1854 publication, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, may have included many if not all of the verses from Forest Leaves; certainly they were included in later collections, particularly those published in the 1890s. In 1850 Frances Watkins took a job at Union Seminary near Columbus, Ohio, as an instructor of domestic science. The move to Union was significant for she was joining, as its first woman teacher, the faculty of a new school for free blacks founded in 1847 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Watkins was not in Ohio long before she began questioning whether her position as a teacher was compatible with her growing interest in social issues. Biographer Lawson Scruggs, in Women of Distinction (1893), records Watkins's letter to a friend in which she expresses her concerns: "What would you do if you were in my place? Would you give up and go back and work at your trade? There are no people that need all the benefits resulting from well-directed education more than we do. The condition of our people, wants of our children and the welfare of our race demand the aid of every helping hand, the God speed of every Christian heart. It is a work of time, a labor of patience, to become an effective school-teacher, and it should be a work of life in which they who engage should not abate heart or hope until it is done. And after all, it is one of woman's most sacred rights to have the privilege of forming the symmetry and rightly adjusting the mental balance of an immortal mind." Her conflict between teaching and the desire to be more actively involved with the antislavery issue grew. Frances Watkins moved to Little York, Pennsylvania, a town on the Underground Railroad, and taught one more year before two events caused her to shift her interests away from a teaching career. First, she met William Grant Still, the black abolitionist and composer from Philadelphia who was widely known for his work with the Underground Railroad. Still, a skillful orator, had a remarkable impact upon Watkins and would later describe in his book on the Underground Railroad the impact that Watkins herself had on the many audiences she addressed. The second event which influenced her decision to join the antislavery movement occurred in 1853, when her home state of Maryland, although a free state, passed a law that permitted the capture of blacks entering the state, whether slave or free. Once captured, they could be remanded to chattel slavery and sold. Watkins began to hear of individual tragedies resulting from the enforcement of this law; they affected her deeply and caused her to strengthen her resolve to fight such abrogations of human rights. In 1853 Watkins relinquished her teaching position and although she was a Unitarian all her life, she never severed her connection with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She frequently promoted the interests of the AME church in her work. In 1854 she moved into the Underground Railroad Station in Philadelphia under Still's tutelage, and she joined the abolitionist movement formally by delivering her initial antislavery lecture in New Bedford, Massachusetts. This first lecture, entitled "Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race," reflected her concern for social and political reform as well as the need for moral uplifting, dual themes that would influence all of her writing. Watkins began traveling as a lecturer for the Maine Antislavery Society. For two years she lectured throughout that state, and her popularity grew quickly. She was recognized as both a scholar and an articulate and effective orator. For the next four years, she lectured on behalf of abolitionist causes throughout Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Delaware, Vermont, Michigan, and Canada where responses to her were enthusiastic. The Liberator regularly carried entries about her speeches as did other papers supportive of the antislavery cause. From the beginning, Watkins included readings from her own poetry in her lectures. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects received the full endorsement of the abolitionist movement and was published with William Lloyd Garrison's preface. Generally well considered, Watkins's poems were even compared, in an article in the Portland Daily Press Scruggs reports, with the works of Emily Dickinson. In style and form, Watkins reflected the influence of popular poets of the period, especially Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans. And except for Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869) one finds that her poetic language and technique are routinely similar. Her poetic voice was nonetheless strong and powerful, and the comparison to Dickinson suggests the positive reception her literary writings were given by an audience that knew her primarily as a lecturer. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects , first published in 1854 and enlarged twice, proved to be her most popular book. The second enlargement (1871) is called the twentieth edition. This version collected twenty-six poems and three prose essays, "Christianity," "The Colored People of America," and "Breathing the Air of Freedom," which, while reflecting the same themes as the poems, were more forward-looking. If the poetry concentrates on the evils of slavery, then the essays prophesy the larger moral and social concerns which would become more visible in her later writings and public lectures. The poems in the collection touch on religion, social and moral reform, and love and death, but antislavery poetry dominates the volume. Watkins's poetry is generally narrative, written in the distinctly oral style of the folk ballad. She made frequent use of familiar biblical themes and imagery. It is Watkins's preference for the rhymed quatrain, most often with an aabb or abcb pattern, that links her to nineteenth-century writers of sentimental poetry in the genteel tradition. Watkins grew adept at working in this popular, conventional style. While her choice of form permitted few technical innovations, Watkins was extremely successful in producing highly lyrical poetry well-suited to her abolitionist themes as well as to social and moral uplift. Watkins's poetry is best known for its directness, its simplicity, and its rhythmic quality. Using vivid imagery, she echoed features of the slave narrative, those nonfiction and fiction accounts of the tribulations of freedmen and women or escaped slaves. Benjamin Brawley and Vernon Loggins, early critics of Afro-American literature, agreed that Watkins was principally responsible for popularizing what became known as the first Negro poetry of protest in the mid-nineteenth century. Watkins's remarkable power and dramatic appeal as a poet come from her strong, rhetorical, oral style. William Robinson in his collection Early Black American Poets (1969) includes Watkins in his discussion of "orator poets," along with Lucy Terry, Jupiter Hammon, George Moses Horton, James Whitfield, and James Madison Bell. According to Robinson, their poetry derives from the rich oral tradition so pervasive in Afro-American culture and is both thematically and technically different from the more formalist poetry of such writers as Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, George McClellan, and Cordelia Ray and from the more decidedly romantic poetry of John Boyd, Albery Whitman, and the Creole poets Armand Lanusse and Victor Séjour. The oratorical ease which characterized her poetry can be seen in the ballad "Eliza Harris," which appeared in Frederick Douglass 's Paper, 23 December 1853, before being included in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. Apparently derived from Uncle Tom's Cabin, this poem is the prototype for Watkins's numerous poems focusing on female figures. It does not show the maturity of later work, but, as these lines demonstrate, it is a solid achievement of her apprentice years: The poem captures the intensity and immediacy of a slave escape in language that is vivid and emotionally charged. More characteristic of the style and structure of Watkins's poetry is her popular "Bury Me in a Free Land," first published in the Liberator in 1864 and again in Lydia Maria Child's Freedmen's Book (1866) before Watkins included it in Poems (1871): Considered her best antislavery poem, "Bury Me in a Free Land" is especially inspiring because of the poet's total empathy with the fate of the slaves whose cause she champions. According to correspondence between Still and Watkins, the poet was in poor health and had actually begun to think that she would die before her life's work was completed. Each stanza builds in dramatic intensity as Watkins describes the agony she experiences. Her request not to be buried "in a land of slaves," which appears at the end of both the first and last stanzas, is both an indication of her recognition of the possibility of an early death as well as her commitment to struggle. According to critic Melba Joyce Boyd, this poem shows Watkins's maturation as a poet, in its correlation between slavery as living death and the narrator's "real" death, a "more sophisticated use of imagery" than in earlier poems, according to Boyd:
As "Bury Me in a Free Land" suggests, Watkins's best poems have an intrinsic mass appeal, which endeared Watkins to her audiences, and made her one of the most popular poets between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Eighteen fifty-nine was an important year for Watkins. The short story, "The Two Offers," appeared in the September and October issues of the short-lived Anglo-African, a black periodical. In the tale, Watkins departs from what is otherwise a traditionally romantic plot by having her protagonist question the wisdom of choosing marriage over social commitment. By 1859 over 12,000 copies of her poetry collection had been sold, and her work had been frequently published in the Liberator, Frederick Douglass 's Paper, and other popular antislavery publications. During this year, Watkins reportedly gave away much of her personal savings and income, earned mainly through her speeches, to aid fugitive slaves. Perhaps the most significant event to occur in 1859 was the wide distribution of Watkins's sympathetic letter to slave insurrectionist John Brown, written while he was imprisoned and under sentence of death for his raid at Harper's Ferry. It is not known when Watkins met Fenton Harper, a widower from Cincinnati, whom she married in 1860. At thirty-five, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper seemed disposed toward retirement from public life. She and her husband settled on a farm near Columbus where Harper continued to write, probably working on new poems and the manuscript for Moses. Details from this period in her life are quite sketchy, but a child, Mary, was born to the Harpers and Fenton Harper died in 1864. After her husband's death, Harper gave up farm life and resumed her lecturing. Following emancipation, she went South for the first time, traveling and lecturing, using her own earnings and living among the people she met. She shared her observations and reports of her experiences through her lectures and writings, and she created the basis for much of her work of the 1870s. Harper's travels in the South added an important dimension to her work; she could combine her interest in moral and social causes with her understanding of the needs of newly freed black people, women in particular. Since Harper had a well-established reputation and firsthand knowledge about the South, she was in a better position than most to speak of the concerns of the Reconstruction period and to advocate civil and equal rights for blacks and women. Harper's views on women matured during her southern tour. William Grant Still, with whom she corresponded regularly during this period, comments in The Underground Railroad (1871) that Harper noted the continuing problems of southern black women: "They have had, some of them, a terribly hard time in Slavery and their subjugation has not ceased in freedom. One man said of some women, that a man must leave them or whip them." Particularly sensitive to the role of working women, Harper was known for refusing payment for lectures attended by women. Harper's first tour of the South concluded in 1867. She returned to Philadelphia but was there less than a year before returning to the South, where she traveled widely between 1868 and 1871. The years spent touring the South not only inspired her interest in southern black rural women but proved to be Harper's most productive as well. Of the three works written in this period--Moses: A Story of the Nile (later enlarged as Idylls of the Bible, 1901), Poems (1871), and Sketches of Southern Life (1872)--Moses is considered by critics to be Harper's best work. A dramatic biblical allegory without overt racial references, the forty-page, blank verse poem nevertheless prophesies the rise of a racial leader analogous to Moses. Possibly inspired by Abraham Lincoln, whom she had previously compared to Moses, Harper narrates the familiar biblical story to symbolize the hope and aspirations of black people; she urges moral uprightness and articulates the need for physical and spiritual freedom. She admonishes her black audience to avoid the fate of the Israelites: "If slavery only laid its weight of chains/Upon the weary, aching limbs, e'en then/It were a curse; but when it frets through nerve/And flesh and eats into the weary soul,/Oh then it is a thing for every human/Heart to loathe, and this was Israel's fate,/They failed to strike the impress from their souls." Harper's other themes--the importance of motherhood, the example of history--are also present in the work. Moses' mother is depicted as a woman who never gives up hope, even when her son is about to be named the future heir to the throne of Egypt. When he decides to return to help his people, she is his mainstay and is credited with instilling in him a sense of racial pride. Moses is quite aware of the choice he has to make; the pleasures of a full life must be weighed against lofty purposes and earnest faith. The moral of the story was that the fate of Israel might be the fate of American blacks. The message was that the struggle for freedom was as yet incomplete; although the Civil War had brought physical freedom, Reconstruction through domestic morality, suffrage, and temperance would have to bring spiritual freedom. Shortly after Harper returned permanently to Philadelphia with her daughter Mary, who never married, she published the two volumes, Poems (1871) and Sketches of Southern Life (1872). Together, the volumes represent the multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory, aspects of Reconstruction. Sketches of Southern Life is a series of connected verse narratives written in a black vernacular speech, but not in the highly stylized, exaggerated black dialect so common in the regionalists of the late nineteenth century. The narrators are former slaves who, on the surface, closely resemble the cunning and deceptive folk narrators of antebellum literature such as Uncle Remus in the tales of Joel Chandler Harris. Sketches of Southern Life, however, differs from this older tradition, for narrators Aunt Chloe and Uncle Jacob, although combining the wisdom of their long years with a characteristic mysticism, have a high degree of political consciousness. They discuss the condition of blacks and the role of education, politics, and religion in uplifting the race. In their innovative style and theme, these narratives provide a dynamic portrait of slave and rural life; the attitudes of slave masters at the advent of the Civil War; the selling of children and eventual reunion of families; the church as the guardian of the social, spiritual, and moral life of black people; and the hopes and failures of Reconstruction. Aunt Chloe is especially effective in expressing Watkins's attitude toward the need for literacy among black people, especially black women. In "Learning to Read," Chloe relates the persistence and tremendous risks involved in learning to read during slavery.
For Chloe, as for Harper, the acquisition of literacy is clearly related to economic independence, an attitude Melba Boyd calls one of the more independent, black feminist ideas of the period. Yet such radical ideas are tempered in the narrator's last words, couched in a tone of mild humor and pride.
Political reform, civil rights, Christian humanism, and human perfection represented various dimensions of political activism for Harper that are comfortably merged in her public speeches and in her poetry. In a letter quoted by Still in Underground Railroad, she expressed her belief in a common ground between the races. She cautions whites, however, that devotion to the welfare of the state "does not consist in increasing the privileges of one class and curtailing the rights of the other." In her view the devastation wrought by the American caste system leads into the heart of the black family and reverberates on every level of an individual's life. She says, "While I am in favor of universal suffrage, yet I know that the colored man needs something more than a vote in his hand; he needs to know the value of a home-life; to rightly appreciate and value the marriage relation; to know how to be incited to leave behind him the old shards and shells of slavery ... like Nautilus, outgrowing his home to build for himself more stately temples of social condition. A man landless, ignorant and poor may use the vote against his own interests, but with intelligence and land he holds in his hand the basis of power and elements of strength." Once in Philadelphia, Harper began to involve herself in social and reform organizations which would claim her as their spokesperson for forty years. In 1872 she organized and became an assistant superintendent of a YMCA Sabbath School. Several years later, she worked with the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, becoming its director in 1894. Maintaining her relationship with the AME church, Harper became involved in many of their activities and her writings frequently appeared in their denominational publications. Harper's activities with the women's movement of the late nineteenth century have become legendary. She was one of the first black women associated with three predominately white and well-established women's organizations, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the American Woman Suffrage Association, and the National Council of Women. In political philosophy, Harper shared the views of the temperance movement activists, who considered social and moral issues of prime importance. Like many of these women, Harper campaigned fervently against lynching and against sexism in the education of women. As early as 1867, Harper had become a leader in the American Equal Rights Association along with Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was the only black person to serve on the Executive Committee of the segregated Women's Christian Temperance Union, and in that position she fought hard to change the policy on organizational segregation. Between 1875 and 1882, she was superintendent of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania chapters of the National Women's Christian Temperance Union, Colored Branch, and continued to be active with the organization as head of the Northern United States WCTU from 1883 to 1893. Although she frequently spoke out against the racism in this organization, she consistently represented the views of those who considered universal suffrage too radical a demand for the day. Her work with the WCTU was recognized by that organization when she was placed on the Red Letter Calendar of the World WCTU in 1922. Between 1875 and 1892, Harper apparently divided her time between the temperance movement, her Sunday school work, the National Council of Women, woman suffrage organizations, and her writing. There is no consistent record of her activities during these years. She attended at least two conventions of the American Woman Suffrage Association (1875 and 1887), and she delivered speeches at the International Council of Women in Washington in 1888 and the National Council of Women in 1891. Harper must have been thinking about her forthcoming novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) when she spoke on the "Duty to Dependent Races" at the National Council. Not only was this speech one of her most comprehensive and persuasive, according to her contemporaries, but it also encompassed all the ideas expressed in her novel. In the address, Harper urged women to work on behalf of equal rights and improved social conditions for blacks and women; the heroine of Iola Leroy personifies the ideal that Harper had in mind when she spoke. Critic Louis Filler has mistakenly suggested that Iola Leroy seemed to have been written for the "edification of Negro Sunday school youth." Filler and other scholars missed the significance of the publication of this book about a committed young black woman, steeped in her own contradictory racial heritage, who defies convention. Published when Harper was sixty-seven, Iola Leroy , in some ways an unconventional story, was the first widely distributed novel by a black woman in America. Iola Leroy is written in the tradition of the sentimental novel and displays many of the genteel characteristics of black fiction written after the Civil War. Set on the eve of the war, the study describes the search for a lost family. A somewhat detached, participant-observer, Iola Leroy travels through the South listening to the narrative histories of former slaves who have become successful merchants and landowners. Iola's mother, Marie, and her brother Harry are looking for Iola; Robert Johnson, Iola's uncle, is looking for his sister Marie and his mother, Mrs. Johnson. Robert represents the earlier generation and the intensity of slave degradation. Robert, Marie, and Mrs. Johnson are victims of the slave trade in which families were separated. Marie is bought by a kindly master who frees, educates, and marries her. Iola Leroy is born from this union. It is only after the death of the master father, while Iola is away at a northern school, that Marie is forced back into slavery. Iola, too, becomes a house slave, but she is released to serve as an army nurse. Harper then sets up a triangle between Iola, a white physician who loves her, and a black physician, whom Iola is destined to marry. As in many typical sentimental novels, Iola Leroy has a heroine with flowing, blonde hair and blue eyes who is pursued by an unsuccessful suitor and in her turn pursues another. The novel has Harper's racial and moral concerns, and it presents black characters as idealized types. Here the novel's resemblance to the nineteenth-century stereotype stops, however, for Harper explores nontraditional themes in relation to her women characters, and she does not fall prey to sentimentalizing Iola's discovery of her true identity. There are innovations, as well, in the employment of the mulatto motif. Iola is not passive, weak, nor simple, as mulattoes of miscegenation novels frequently were. Rather she is fiercely independent, insisting that women must be "self-reliant" and that they should receive educations equal to men. The theme of a commitment to the education of the free black is in keeping with the aims of social reform of the period, but Harper's somewhat unorthodox view of the changing roles of women suggests that she was a bit more racial than her colleagues. Iola experiences no inner conflict regarding her black racial identity nor is she unable to reconcile her roles as social activist and wife. She remains true to her goals of becoming professionally independent, working in the South, and marrying a black man who shares her commitment to uplift the race. A sensitivity to the special plight and oppression of black working women and former slave women distinguished Harper from white feminists of the period, many of whom supported the policies of racial segregation in their own organizations. This theme was prominent in her writing and in her public speeches of this period. As early as 1878, she invoked the term "double duty," when she wrote in "The Colored Woman of America," for the Englishwoman's Review, that rural women had their housework and also ran the farms on which they lived in the absence of their fathers, husbands, or male companions, working together sometimes with their own children or another female partner. "Double Standard," one of the poems from The Sparrow's Fall (1890?), expresses what might be considered the popular feminist sentiment of the era. The poem is sharply critical of a society that will excuse a man for his sexual improprieties while condemning the woman for hers:
In the final stanzas, the narrator's optimism is restored as she thinks of God's love and justice as opposed to man's.
After almost a century of relative critical neglect Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted is slowly being accorded a place in the canon of Afro-American literature. Barbara Christian, in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985). notes that Harper's novel has characteristics, such as the theme of the tragic mulatto, which remain dominant in the fiction of later black women novelists. According to Christian the audience for the novelistic romance was primarily female, and Harper modified the idealized heroine of the novel with some of the features of the late-nineteenth-century black women. By doing so, Harper accomplished her own purpose of writing an inspirational and consciousness-raising work, which would have had a very wide circulation within the growing movement. Despite the apparent radicalism of Iola Leroy, Harper took a somewhat conservative view on suffrage as she spoke before the 1893 World Congress of Representative Women at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In her address, "Women's Political Future,"she made her now-often-quoted statement opposing unrestricted and universal suffrage for men or women, believing, as she indicated, in moral and educational tests. At the close of this speech she delivered a stirring call to women: "O Women of America! into your hands God has pressed one of the sublimest opportunities that ever came into the hands of the women of any race or people. It is yours to create a healthy public sentiment; to demand justice, simple justice, as the right of every race; to brand with everlasting infamy the lawless and brutal cowardice that lynches, burns, and tortures your own countrymen." Differences of opinion on universal suffrage or other political issues were normal for the period; yet, they did not prevent black women from organizing. Harper shared many of the ideas about the special needs of black women held by Ida Wells Barnett, Victoria Earle Matthews, Susan McKinney, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, all of whom had been instrumental in forming the black women's club movement, beginning in 1892. These clubs merged to form the National Association of Colored Women, established in Washington, D.C., in 1895, with Harper as one of its founding members. After Iola Leroy Harper published Atlanta Offering, Poems (1895), which included the previously published The Sparrow's Fall and Other Poems and The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (1894?), as well as other work. Like most of Harper's writings before the Civil War, the themes in this collected volume were familiar to her audience. There is her characteristic didacticism and morality, especially her pronouncements against racism, illiteracy, and physical abuse, particularly against women and children, and a reliance upon biblical themes and imagery. Many of the poems contained in this volume were inspired by her travels throughout the South, and they reflect her strong optimism and social commitment. "The Martyr of Alabama," a rather unusual challenge to Harper's hopefulness about social conditions, concerns the murder of a black boy who refuses to entertain whites. The poem is as much a tribute to his Christian martyrdom as it is an indictment of the depravity of whites. Thus despite her praise for "The Present Age," Harper was always prepared to expose the truth. Her poetry registers a constant plea for social, moral, and political reform through Christian unity and an adherence to Christian principles. In all of these collections, Harper continued to portray black people who had been victimized by slavery and who continued to be exploited after emancipation. Harper's last political and social involvement was her organizing work with the National Association of Colored Women, which represented the struggle for civil rights both for blacks and women. It embodied the very ideals that had been Harper's life's work and it involved such leading black figures as Harriet Tubman, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida Wells Barnett--some of whom she had worked with for more than forty years. Although she had retired from the WCTU, she accepted the vice-presidency of the NACW a year after its founding (1897). In this position, she became even more vocal on the subject of women and equal rights. Thus, Harper, like many of the reformers of the period, is seen as a prototypical feminist; renewed interest in her among twentieth-century feminists is due to this fact. If we accept the view put forward by Paula Giddings in When and Where I Enter (1984) that the convictions held by black women leaders such as Harper "inevitably led to feminist ideas," certainly more thoroughgoing criticism of Frances Harper's literary and ideological contribution is long overdue.
After 1901 Harper appeared less and less in public; her health was declining and she was nearly eighty years old. Apparently her daughter died sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century, preceding Harper herself by only a few years. On 22 February 1911 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper died of heart failure. The most significant black woman poet of the nineteenth century, Harper had remained in the forefront of radical black and women's movements, yet her passing went relatively unnoticed. Although few of her books, manuscripts, and correspondence have been preserved, and no full-length biography has yet been written of Harper, studies that critically assess her work and importance as a literary and historical figure are beginning to appear. FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Written by: Maryemma Graham, University of Mississippi Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 50: Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1986. pp. 164-173. Gale Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography
|
