Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

[Frances Harper] was orphaned at an early age and raised by an aunt. She attended a school for free blacks, which was run by her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins. Her formal education ended at age thirteen. Harper became a nursemaid and found additional employment as a seamstress, needlecraft teacher, and traveling abolitionist lecturer. She also lectured in support of woman suffrage. She later became a schoolteacher in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In 1860 she married Fenton Harper; they had one child, who died in 1909. After her husband's death in 1864, she returned to the lecture circuit, promoting black education and Sunday school teaching. She also served as superintendent of colored work in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and often made speeches on its behalf, pointing out the evils of strong drink and the need for higher standards of morality. Continuing her feminist pursuits after the abolition of slavery, Harper spoke at the Women's Rights convention in 1866 and the Equal Rights Association in 1869. Although she more strongly advocated black male suffrage at that time, she continued to stress the need for women's right to vote. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women in the 1890s and served as a vice president until her death.

Harper's poetry and prose were political. Her works tackled the issue of slavery and the cruelty endured by slave women. The final two lines of one of her more popular poems, "Bury Me in a Free Land," poignantly expresses the desire of slaves: "All that my yearning spirit craves / Is bury me not in a land of slaves." The "Slave Auction" addressed the issue of children being sold away from their mothers:

Feminism was often the theme of Harper's works. The poem "Deliverance" (from Sketches of a Southern Life) is concerned with the response of women to men who abused the privilege of voting:

About the year 1853, Maryland, her native State, had enacted a law forbidding free people of color from the North from coming into the State on pain of being imprisoned and sold into slavery. A free man, who had unwittingly violated this infamous statute, had recently been sold to Georgia, and had escaped thence by secreting himself behind the wheel-house of a boat bound northward; but before he reached the desired haven, he was discovered and remanded to slavery. It was reported that he died soon after from the effects of exposure and suffering. In a letter to a friend referring to this outrage, Mrs. Harper thus wrote: "Upon that grave I pledged myself to the Anti-Slavery cause."