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Why does the general public today know so little about the life and writing of Frances Harper? She accomplished a great deal in her lifetime, and was a leading voice for African Americans in several national movements over the course of several decades. An abolitionist, temperance organizer, and suffragist, Frances Harper was also the most important Black poet in the country until the 1890s. She published many books of verse, four novels, numerous essays, letters, and newspaper reports, and several short stories. Her poetry readings and speeches were always sought-after events, well attended by the public.

Two book-length monographs on her literary and professional work have been published in the last three decades. Melba Boyd’s Discarded Legacy (1994) and Michael Stancliff’s Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (2011) give readers a thorough overview of her career and creative work, if from different perspectives. Frances Smith Foster’s reader A Brighter Coming Day (1990) provides a handy resource that includes many of Harper’s recovered poems, novels, speeches, and letters. Most of her recovered work has been the subject of academic articles, and also longer book chapters, by some of the most influential academics in the field of African American history and literary studies.

Frances Harper was by any professional measure one of the most successful individuals in the last half of the nineteenth century. She didn’t, however, gain recognition by doing what was expected or easily achieved. As a Black woman, born free in the time of slavery, Harper sought above all to apply her creative talents to fighting for racial and gender equality in the US.

Frances Harper is at one level a formidable interlocutor. Her many poems, speeches, letters, short fiction, and novels make for a daunting engagement. There are some decisions that have to be made about the presentation and the argument about Frances Harper’s contribution to Black intellectual thought, as a historical figure and for us today. I have chosen to present her writing and aspects of her professional life as a cohesive argument about how she thought of politics, equality, and the challenges of democracy. There are many different approaches possible with the study of the writing of someone so prolific and talented, as well as someone who was actively organizing politically throughout her life.

Frances Harper lived in interesting times, during which, after two centuries, a Civil War brought about the end of slavery. She spent 40 years fighting for voting rights for women, falling short of this goal in her lifetime. She witnessed the creation of a new regime of racial terror in the US, the collapse of the hopes and dreams of a newly freed people, at a time when industry was advancing rapidly. She traveled extensively, met thousands of people over her life, and was an astute observer of her environment and the living conditions of the people around her.

Frances Harper comforted John Brown’s wife after the failed rebellion as he was waiting to be executed; she lectured alongside Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass; she was friends with Harriet Tubman; and she regularly had Ida B. Wells stay at her house in Philadelphia when she was traveling through. She was used to long hours on trains and coaches, and walking through the quarters of former slaves on plantations in Alabama and Georgia. She was raised in what was then the center of Black life in the US, Baltimore, Maryland, and so grew up surrounded by intense social activity. This is someone I would have loved to meet and talk politics with. Frances Harper was extremely talented and was always working on different projects of great importance and interest to many.

I have chosen to provide an overview of some of her writings, while ignoring the letters as private, and skipping some of the short pieces of fiction, and that comes at a cost. Frances Harper wrote and accomplished enough in her lifetime that no one series of poems, books, short stories, speeches, and letters can be thought to encapsulate her oeuvre. The closest we have to a comprehensive review of Frances Harper’s work is the extensive study done by Melba Boyd in Discarded Legacy. Frances Smith Foster has – in collecting many of the available written works of Frances Harper in one volume, A Brighter Coming Day – not only provided useful commentary, but also organized the work chronologically so that the reader can follow the arc of Frances Harper’s life in the written material. Stancliff, in his book, applies the work of Frances Harper to the study of rhetoric and pedagogy with superb results.

Acknowledging Frances Harper’s genius and the incredible scope of her work, the fact that there are many very good studies to draw from, including articles written on specific works by Harper, is encouraging. I want us to read Frances Harper, and to do so as a call to a democratic politics that requires that race and gender be central to our understanding of this society. Her work is compelling and demanding, and without the research and recovery work of several amazing academic historians it would not be possible to read it. Frances Harper’s works have not been adequately preserved, which in part accounts for her obscurity. For the last four decades, scholars have done the investigative work to find and restore her legacy to us.

I have chosen to use the name Frances Harper throughout to signal her authorship, even though this does interestingly coincide conceptually with the struggle that she experienced in her own life, where she wasn’t accorded sufficient professional respect as a speaker on behalf of the Abolition of slavery until she had been married. As Frances Watkins prior to her marriage, she published poems and was active in public gatherings as a speaker, and the brief years of her marriage were a time of relative retreat from public writing. After her husband’s death, the appellation “Harper” appended to her name allowed her the social cover afforded by the patriarchal tradition of the time. This distinction of social respectability, of having been married, in contrast to being an unmarried woman, was important in public, as a public speaker, and in the context of being a woman author of poetry and prose.

The reader should understand that there is a particular convention of names and naming, a politics of respectability with regard to women as authors, that remains accepted today, and that the social elements of this convention directly speak to a similar politics of race and gender that Frances Harper made the central part of her life’s work. Names are not innocent, but full of portent and history, and few authors have been more aware of this than Frances (Ellen Watkins) Harper. I use the name Frances Harper here throughout not to conceal or suture over this politics, but to suggest that it matters that when she could have returned to using her maiden name of Watkins, after her husband’s death, she did not; that, when she could choose, she kept the name of Harper, when as a child she could not choose anything but the name of Watkins. Harper was the family she chose.

It is through this representation of respectability, publicity, and personal ambition contained in what seems today marginal, even ephemeral, to a life of the writer and poet Frances Harper that we can begin to understand the challenge her work poses for us today. This was someone who – not only in her poetry and writing, but in her person, her speeches, and organizational activity – raised a challenge to the idea that Black women have not always been central to the development of the society. In this struggle against the social elision of Black women in society, Frances Harper is of course not unique. What she was able to do, however, was not only to overcome the social conventions of her time to publish, speak in public, and organize at the national level, but also to write about the problem of race and gender at a time when women couldn’t vote, and for the first decades of her life she was a free Black person in a society where the enslavement of Black people was the social norm.

Frances Harper wrote, lectured, and organized while being active at the heart of the Abolitionist Movement, the Temperance Movement, and the Suffragist Movement. She traveled in the South immediately after the Civil War, and sent what today would amount to newsworthy dispatches north from the frontlines of the aftermath of the War. Frances Harper was one of the architects of the modern Women’s Rights Movement, and she also was one of the first truly public intellectuals for Black Americans in the country. She spoke to and wrote for Black men and women at a time when the struggle to define the terms of Black life in America was both visceral and of immediate concern to everyone in the society.

It is important to understand that, though the sheer volume and contribution Frances Harper made to her public and the society during her lifetime are unappreciated today, certain pieces of her work have circulated widely. The claim in this book follows that of the researcher Frances Foster and others: that Frances Harper wasn’t ignored, but instead diminished in importance. There is a particular politics, therefore, not simply of recovery, but of discovery, of developing a new description of the place of African Americans in this society, in working with the writing of Frances Harper. This book contributes to existing scholarship that seeks to make one of the most important thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century available to a wider audience. In doing so, it also provides a description of another America, a new society that we should aspire to become – one that acknowledges and understands the contribution of all members of the society to how we think of this nation.

The structure of the book is designed with, first, a biographical chapter. Chapter 2 discusses the novel Iola Leroy, in order to frame the oeuvre of Frances Harper and to provide an understanding of the themes of her earlier writings. Next, chapter 3 addresses Trial and Triumph, and then chapter 4 Sowing and Reaping and “The Two Offers.” Chapter 5 considers Minnie’s Sacrifice and the poetry of Frances Harper. Chapter 6 concludes the book with a discussion of her poetry.

Three considerations guide this approach to her work. The first and most important is that readers encounter the familiar first. If they have read anything by Frances Harper, it is usually Iola Leroy, and if not, it was one of the most popular novels in the last decade of the nineteenth century and should occupy pride of place for that reason. Second, I want the reader to get an understanding of the sophistication that determined the choices made by Frances Harper of genre, plot, and character in the novel, and to appreciate the overwhelming task with which she was faced in trying to establish a narrative of hope and progress for Black people in the 1890s in the US. The book was published the same year as Ida B. Wells’ study of lynching, Southern Horrors.

Third, the reader today knows that what Frances Harper tries to do in the novel with regard to her intended audience fails. I want the reader to understand that this is why the work of Frances Harper has been neglected until recently. In Iola Leroy, Frances Harper tried to gather the strands of a decaying set of political possibilities that were offered with the freeing of the slaves at the end of the Civil War. She tries to bind everyone up together. It is because she does this in Iola Leroy that we have in the novel her mature thinking about the politics of race as a societal idea. In the novel, she provides for the reader a vision of potential societal change, of what counts for political progress as a nation. It is here that she develops for us a radical egalitarian vision.

Chapter 3 takes up the novel Trial and Triumph to provide the reader with Frances Harper’s perspective on community. What is required of the idea of equality to form a progressive and thriving community? Given the forces threatening to dissolve the relationships that the freed people had managed to develop after the War, what should the community do to resist its dissolution? In the novel, Frances Harper discusses the criteria for social community relations, how desire, avarice, fame, and modesty can be acknowledged so that the community can meet the challenges that it faces from a reconsolidating White authority in the society. The novel discusses many of the same problems of race and gender as we have today, and Frances Harper demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the need for a description of equality that is always aspirational, external to the current conditions in the existing community.

In chapter 4, the reader is asked to think with Frances Harper about the demand for individual perfectionism and the problem of moral suasion in the society. The discussion considers the idea of individual, personal politics in the novel Sowing and Reaping, and includes also a study of the short story “The Two Offers.” Frances Harper had the idea that the personal realizes concrete results in the community – a politics that then realizes change in the larger social world. She felt that, from personal decisions about morality and social practices, the necessary political changes could occur that would protect the community. The chapter addresses the struggle by the individual to determine how to positively contribute to the needs of the community.

The second through fourth chapters develop Frances Harper’s description of how social change occurs and what is at stake in the period after the War for the society. Focusing on societal, community, and personal perspectives in her work allows the reader to grasp the complexity of her writing and activism. In chapter 5, the reader encounters the earliest of Frances Harper’s novels in Minnie’s Sacrifice; and the idea of what Frances Harper means by politics, and what her goals were in the work, are considered. The reader is brought into conversation extensively with her poetry for the first time. In doing this, we have come full circle to the reading of Iola Leroy in chapter 2. We can see the genesis of Iola Leroy in our study of Minnie’s Sacrifice and the poems, and can ask the question of how we today should reconsider the challenges Frances Harper posed to her audience in the last half of the nineteenth century. In chapter 6, the conclusion, the conversation with the poems continues. The reader is asked to think with Harper about what is required to achieve progress toward racial and gender equality in the society.