Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to free parents. At 3, both of her parents had died, and she went to live with her maternal aunt and uncle, who were civil rights activists and abolitionists. She attended the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which her uncle had founded, and at 13, began to work as a nursemaid for a Quaker family who owned a bookshop. In her free time, she continued her education by herself, reading the books in the shop and sharpening her writing skills. At 14, she began publishing her poems in antislavery journals, such as Frederick Douglass’ The Liberator. In 1845, at 20, she published her first verse collection, titled Forest Leaves.
At 26, she moved to Wilberforce, Ohio, where she taught domestic science at Union Seminary, a school for free African-Americans, where she was the first female teacher. After two years, she moved to teach at another school in York, Pennsylvania, joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and continued to publish her poems.
In 1854, at 29, she delivered her first antislavery speech called The Elevation and Education of Our People, which received praise. Afterward, she embarked on a two-year lecturing tour in Maine, in which she often recited from her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. She became a popular orator, and over the next eight years, she gave lectures across the US and Canada. She published essays, novels, and short stories, in which she wrote about the observations of her traveling, expressing her thoughts about racism, abolition, feminism, temperance, and classism.
In 1860, at the age of 35, she married Fenton Harper. When he died four years later, she resumed her lectures and began to connect with women’s rights advocates, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1866, at the National Woman’s Rights Convention, she gave a speech titled We Are All Bound Up Together, calling for the inclusion of Black women in the suffrage movement, emphasizing that Black women were facing racism in addition to sexism. The next day, the attendees formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to advocate for African-Americans’ and women’s right to vote. In the short time the AERA operated, Harper served on its Finance Committee.
In 1870, following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote, Harper began to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mobile, Alabama, to encourage as many people to use their right to vote. She detailed her encounters with the newly freed men and their struggles in her poem collection, Sketches of Southern Life.
In the next two decades, Harper was involved in numerous reform organizations. She headed the Colored Section of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, served as the director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, and co-founded the National Association of Colored Women alongside Harriet Tubman and Margaret Murray Washington, later serving as its vice president. During this time, she continued to publish her work, including 12 books and countless essays and articles. She died of heart failure at the age of 85.
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