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.
1 Frances Harper’s Poetic Journey
A life of consciences
We are always writing for the present, for those who share the concerns and anxieties of our lives. But, of course, we can’t know how what we say and do today is measured by those who come after us, in spite of our desire to inhabit the thoughts and concerns of those who follow. Frances Harper – author, abolitionist, orator, political organizer, temperance activist, suffragist, mother, Black, American, woman – she dedicated her life to the politics of racial and gender justice.
Frances Harper was born in 1825 and lived an incredible life, sharing her ideas and her creativity with an American public until her death in 1911. She grew up a free Black person in a society where the majority of Black people were enslaved. The writer of the first short story published by an African American woman, Frances Harper also produced Iola Leroy, one of the most popular fiction novels in the US of the latter half of the nineteenth century. She was an accomplished and popular poet, and was able to make a living on the sale of her poetry at a time when it was not possible for a Black person to find a position at a university. An important orator and organizer for the Abolitionist Movement, the Temperance Movement, and the Suffragist Movement, Frances Harper was an activist – what we today call a public intellectual – with
