Yet offering herself as a speaker, to the skepticism of others in the organizations, and doing so against the social norms of the day must have been very stressful, and required determination.
Because of the focus of her writing and professional life, I suspect Frances Harper was someone who refused to be defined by the expectations of others. She was someone who wanted to establish in her person the equality, even superiority, of her own faculties, relative to those who would constantly have projected a social conviction of an innate racial superiority over her. This is an enormous weight to bear, this daily struggle against the pretentions of those who, being White, can rely on social norms of racial superiority to further their own desires. In a time when so many Black people were enslaved, the weight of what could be called “racial representation” must have been stifling for a young Black Frances Harper, who was both a poet and ambitious.
Frances Harper and Sojourner Truth were the only Black women who regularly lectured on the wider abolitionist speaker circuits. Sojourner Truth, a former slave, was much older and would sing and speak briefly of her former life as a slave in the North. Referring to printed copies of her narrative for sale, as well as her image, Truth therefore represented something different from the eloquent and literate poet Frances Harper, who would recite from her own poems and speak on the issues of Abolition as a moral imperative. The audience listening to both in one evening would have heard two converging ideas about Black life in the North: the former slave testifying as to the brutality of the experience, and the free woman poet declaiming on the merits of a faith whose moral probity would come with Black Emancipation. In encountering these discussions of what slavery was like and what freedom had wrought, the audience could equate the two as representing the political possibilities of Blackness.
In 1859, at the age of 34, Frances Harper published the short story “The Two Offers” (Foster, 1990). The same year, Harper spent the weeks leading up to the hanging of John Brown – sentenced for the failed rebellion at Harpers Ferry – offering material and emotional support to his wife (Parker, 2010, p. 109). This connection with Brown demonstrates the centrality of the young Frances Harper to the Movement, and suggests that she was more familiar with the organized struggle in the slave states involving the Underground Railroad than is evident from her letters and public writing.
Harper’s relationship with Brown also hints at her understanding of the relationship between gender and race as important to the definition of the Emancipation being sought by the abolitionists. What role was she to be permitted in the Movement, if the wife of John Brown was not also implicated by law in the acts of her husband? Today, this complex assumption of a gender distinction of complicity in the work of the Movement may seem odd at first, but it should remind us that women could not vote, or own property, and were not perceived as public equals to men. They were expected to define their own ambitions through the men in their lives.
This expectation that women define themselves by the men around them would have been extremely difficult for a single woman such as Frances Harper to avoid as a social mandate, and so the absence of men in her life up until 1860 is an important question for future research to explore. At the same time, for Harper, involvement in the Movement came without obvious male attachments or relationships beyond those in the form of older patrons such as William Still. Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” follows on this theme by providing a meditation on the choices available for women, in terms of marriage and professional life, while they did not have formal political rights in the society (Foster, 2010, p. 35). This story emphasized the importance of rights for Black women, as well as the need to develop moral certainty within the Black community. “The Two Offers” challenged the misogyny evident at the time in the Black community, and rejected the required dependence of Black women on the moral constancy of Black men. The publishing of this short story poignantly frames the personal choice that Frances Harper herself made to marry the next year, in 1860, and defines much of what we know about her life in the coming War years from 1860 to 1865.
Frances Harper in the 1860s and 1870s
Frances Harper married Fenton Harper in 1860, just as the Civil War broke out. The two of them and his three children moved to Ohio, bought land with the money that she had made from the sale of her poetry, and started a dairy farm. While taking a break from the speaker circuit, Frances Watkins Harper remained active as both a lecturer and an essayist during these years (Foster, 1990, p. 18; Still, 1872, pp. 764–6). In 1864, Fenton Harper died, leaving Frances Harper with four children to support and considerable financial debt. Since, as a woman, she was unable to secure the debt, after the bank repossessed her dairy equipment she was forced to lecture to generate income beyond the royalties from her books. It is not evident from biographical material what she arranged for the older children, but it is known that Frances Harper moved to Boston with her biological child, Mary, after she lost the farm.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, in 1865, Frances Harper began her travels in the South, becoming one of many Northerners who sought to assist the newly freed slaves (Dudden, 2011, p. 115). She lectured and taught throughout the Southern states, often to audiences made up exclusively of Black women, but also to racially mixed audiences comprised of men and women, sometimes staying in the cabins of former slaves (Still, 1872, p. 772). Based upon these experiences, Frances Harper found it imperative to write about the difficult and impoverished circumstances of the newly freed people in her poetry and fiction.
Harper also participated in the new national organizational efforts by which activists in the North sought to secure political rights for the newly freed persons. That this effort was, by participants, increasingly connected organizationally with the rights of women is not a coincidence, as the issue of rights was one around which women had agitated since the founding of the nation (Brooks, 2018, p. 300). The success of this national organizational activity in the decades before the War was evident in the Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls. The Civil War represented for the government an implosion of institutional norms, which brought with it a renewed organizational effort to secure rights for women.
In 1866, Frances Harper gave a speech at the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York. This speech represented her coming into national prominence for the post-War activist push for women’s rights, work that would occupy her for the major part of the next few decades. For Harper, this transition from Abolition to Women’s Rights after the War seems straightforward, given her personal and professional interests, and the relationships she had made through the success of her public speaking and published writing. She had always been a public advocate for political equality as a free Black woman, and the rights of women and free Black people were the major topic of the post-War period. She was also one of the most prominent public figures in the Abolitionist Movement, a nationally recognized poet and public speaker whose work was often in print in the newspapers and magazines of the Black community.
As she observes in her speech in 1866, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” race after the Civil War remained a central concern for her vision of the country. In the speech, she describes how her friend Harriet Tubman, the last time she saw her, had swollen hands from having to fight a train conductor who had tried to eject her from the train. Calling Tubman “Moses,” Frances Harper says, “The woman whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel” (Harper, 1990f, p. 219). She goes on to ask whether White women need the vote to get them to care about the injustices done in their name (Dudden, 2011, pp. 84–5; Painter, 1996). This direct convergence of the issues of gender and race in the speech reveal how, for Harper, the idea of Black men supporting Tubman in her efforts to bring slaves to freedom could potentially lead to their improved understanding of the need to now support the rights of women. The importuning of Tubman as a woman in a physical altercation with the conductor should allow for the understanding by White women of the need for rights for Black people, as in their own struggle. Was not Tubman also a woman, yet having to physically fight to be allowed on a train as a Black person?
The provision by Frances Harper already in 1866,
