Frances E. W. Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born free in Baltimore, Maryland, on the twenty-fourth of September 1825. She was orphaned at three and raised by her uncle William Watkins, a free Black abolitionist and educator, at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth.

She produced, across six decades of public life, the most extensive body of work by an African American woman in the nineteenth century. Her first book, Forest Leaves (1845), was published when she was twenty. Her second, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), sold ten thousand copies in five years — making her the best-selling African American poet of the antebellum period. Her novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) was one of the first novels published by an African American woman in the English language.

She was a sustained presence on the abolitionist and suffragist lecture circuit through the 1850s and 1860s, lecturing in every state of the Northeast and the Midwest under the auspices of the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. Her 1866 speech to the National Women's Rights Convention — in which she argued, against the white-suffragist majority, that the cause of Black men's suffrage could not be subordinated to the cause of women's suffrage — anticipated by a century the analysis that bell hooks (also placed in this archive) would later make as Black feminism.

She was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women alongside Mary Church Terrell and Harriet Tubman — both also placed in this archive — in 1896 and served as its vice president.

She died in Philadelphia on the twenty-second of February 1911, age eighty-five.

She is honored here as the abolitionist poet whose lectures and books sustained Black women's political voice across six decades.