Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer.

[1] As a young woman in 1850, Harper taught domestic science at Union Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, a school affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

[2] In 1851, while living with the family of William Still, a clerk at the Pennsylvania Abolition Society who helped refugee slaves make their way along the Underground Railroad, Harper started to write anti-slavery literature.

Her collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) was a commercial success, making her the most popular African American poet before Paul Laurence Dunbar.

[7][3] In 1850, at age 26, Watkins moved from Baltimore to teach domestic science at Union Seminary, an AME-affiliated school for Black students near Columbus, Ohio.

[14] A single copy of this volume, long lost, was rediscovered in the early 21st century by scholar Johanna Ortner in Baltimore, at the Maryland Historical Society in the 2010s.

[2] In 1858, Harper refused to give up her seat or ride in the "colored" section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia[17] (97 years before Rosa Parks).

Throughout the two stanzas, Harper demonstrates the restricted relationship between an enslaved mother and her child, while including themes of family, motherhood, humanity and slavery.

[22] Another of her poems, "To the Cleveland Union Savers," published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle of Feb. 23, 1861, champions Sara Lucy Bagby, the last person in the United States to be returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law.

[27]: 80 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a strong supporter of abolitionism, prohibition and woman's suffrage, progressive causes that were connected before and after the American Civil War.

Harper wrote to John Brown after he had been arrested and before his execution: "I thank you that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race; I hope from your sad fate great good may arise to the cause of freedom.

"[30] After the Civil War ended in 1865, Harper moved South to teach newly freed Black people during the Reconstruction Era.

[32] "Activists like Harper and Frances Willard campaigned not only for racial and sexual equality but also for a new understanding of the federal government's responsibility to protect rights, regulate morality, and promote social welfare".

In 1891, Harper delivered a speech to the National Council of Women of America in Washington D.C., demanding justice and equal protection by the law for the African American people.

[4] In her speech, she stated:"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.

I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me...While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.

[4] Harper served as a member of AERA's Finance Committee, though Black women comprised only five of the organization's fifty-plus officers and speakers.

[35][38] AERA was short-lived, ending when Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which would grant African American men the right to vote.

[35] Some of AERA's suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did not support the Amendment's aim to enfranchise Black men without extending suffrage rights to women.

[35] In addition to delivering speeches, Harper also promoted her intersectional suffrage advocacy in later years by helping found the National Association for Colored Women (NACW) in 1896.

Her poem, "The Deliverance," published in her 1872 anthology, Sketches of Southern Life, discusses the vote through the lens of fictional Black female narratives during the Reconstruction era.

Not only does Aunt Kitty, the sole female figure in the text, "toss" the meat and flour, but she also scolds Reeder and makes him cry.

your sweetest chimes, Ye bells, that call to praise; Let every heart with gladness thrill, And songs of joyful triumph raise.

Amid the noblest of the land"[42]In these stanzas, Harper includes exclamation points, alongside imagery such as "chimes" of the bells, and a command for the African American people to "shake off the dust."

Upon receiving voting rights, Black men are "crowned" and become "amid the noblest of the land," posing a contrast with their "once despised name" that Harper references.

Her novel Minnie's Sacrifice, published in 1869—in the same year as the Fifteenth Amendment debates—describes the vote as a defense mechanism for Black women as victims of racial violence in the Reconstruction South.

For example, scholar Jen McDaneld Archived 2021-01-26 at the Wayback Machine argues in her analysis of the novel that the need for protection of the law, which the vote could help Black women obtain, is "rooted in both radicalized and gendered injustices that cannot be extricated from one another.

Responding to the male character Louis, who believes the nation is "not prepared for" Black women's suffrage, Minnie states:"I cannot recognize that the negro man is the only one who has pressing claims at this hour.

"[44]Through Minnie's statement, Harper conveys a desire for Black women to achieve suffrage rights in order to defend themselves from oppression.

[43] Indeed, Harper does not appear in the History of Woman Suffrage anthology written by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were original members of the NWSA.