[12][13][14] These perspectives come from a personal place according to Julie Winch (a writer of History at the University of Massachusetts), and are informed by Forten Purvis's ancestry, status and intellectual background.
[7] Though Forten Purvis was never herself oppressed through the chattel slavery system, her poetry extensively made example of the anguish within the experience of being enslaved as a woman of African descent.
Gray suggests that what makes this poem inherently intersectional in its feminism is Forten Purvis's identification of the plurality of being Black and being female in comparison to the lived experience of being a white woman.
[15] As can be noted in additional poetry from Forten Purvis, the dualistic nature of blackness in relation to womanhood is a common theme.
[15] Ira V. Brown additionally specifies that the women who acted within the Philadelphia Female Anti Slavery society, through whatever those actions were (in Forten Purvis's case, creative poetry) were contributors to what she called "The Cradle of Feminism.
"[6] On the topic of Prejudice, Forten Purvis believed that all people regardless of gender had a responsibility to act as political catalysts in the Abolition of slavery.
[25] It specified that man or woman were to be equal contributors to the cause and that women, regardless of their politically oppressions condition at the time must consider their "sisters" and act upon this consideration.
As specified by Jean Fagan Yellin, Forten Purvis privately added her rendition of the emblem as a sketch into Elizabeth Smith's album.
According to some scholars, a Quaker abolitionist by the name of Eliza Earle Hacker (1807-1846), from Rhode Island, had been the author of what many thought to be some of Forten Purvis's work.
Regardless, many Anti-Slavery and Abolition Authors used pen names to protect their identity and as a result, it has become difficult to attribute certain works to certain individuals.
[8] For this reason the chart only includes works in which the place of original is specified as being Philadelphia (Forten Purvis's home state).
Specifically, Ada's poem "Lines: Suggested on Reading 'An Appeal to Christian Women of the South' by Angelina Grimké," was most likely written by Hacker but often attributed to Forten and included in African-American writing anthologies.