Known as the “Bronze Muse,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a prolific writer in every genre, using her gifts for social protest. She was born on September 24th 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland to free Black parents. Orphaned at the age of three, Watkins went to live with her aunt and uncle, Harriet and William Watkins. Harper attended the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which was run by her uncle. Her uncle juggled several occupations in order to support the family, including preaching, shoemaking, and medicine.
Harper grew up in an environment that displayed an intimate geographic proximity to slavery, since Maryland was a slave state. She had already attained a high-quality education when she left school at age 14. Like other young women, Frances learned the female “trades” of sewing and domestic work in addition to learning academic subjects at her uncle’s school. Despite her schooling, she could only find domestic work, and was employed by a Quaker family who ran a bookstore.
After she left school in 1839, Harper's first poems were published in abolitionist periodicals, such as Frederick Douglass' Paper. Exposed to a wide array of literature, Harper continued to write poetry as she had in her youth, and in 1845, she published her first collection of poems, "Forest Leaves". In 1850, Harper left Baltimore and moved to Ohio, where she taught at Union Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio. Her acceptance of the position was met with considerable protest. After a brief tenure teaching in Pennsylvania, she became a traveling abolitionist speaker and worked to help enslaved people escape the South via the Underground Railroad.
This experience had a profound effect on Harper, her poetry and her later work as an activist. In 1854, Harper was exiled from Maryland because of new slavery laws stating that Black people who came in through the northern border of Maryland could be sold into slavery. This marked the beginning of Harper's activism. In August 1854 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Watkins delivered a public address on “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race.” She continued giving anti-slavery speeches throughout the northern United States and Canada.
Her success there led to a two-year lecture tour in Maine for the state Anti-Slavery Society. Her speeches included her prose and poetry, in which she combined the issues of racism, feminism and classism. She combined her talents as a writer, poet, and public speaker with a deep commitment to abolition and social reform. She captivated Black and White audiences alike with dramatic recitations of her her poetry, speeches, and essays on abolitionism, temperance, and woman suffrage.
Her early associations with influential abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and William Still helped in the publication and circulation of her work. In addition to her rigorous lecturing schedule, Harper was also working on a second book of poems, "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects," published in 1854, , which was quite successful and was several times enlarged and reissued. While traveling and lecturing, several thousand copies of her books were sold, and Harper donated a large portion of the proceeds to the Underground Railroad.
In 1858, Frances Watkins refused to give up her seat in the White section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia. This was one hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This incident inspired one of her most enduring poems, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” first published in "The Anti-Slavery Bugle." In 1860, Watkins married Fenton Harper and settled on a farm in Ohio. She married Fenton Harper in 1860 and settled on a farm in Ohio. He brought to the marriage three children of his own.
With the birth of their daughter, Mary, in 1862, she wrote less frequently. When her husband died in 1864, Harper continued to support her family though speaking engagements. After her husband’s death saddled her with a large debt, Harper resumed lecturing for the antislavery cause, teaching, and writing poetry and novels in order to support herself and her family. Harper formed alliances with strong figures in the feminist movement, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
In 1866, Harper gave a moving speech before the National Women's Rights Convention demanding equal rights for all, including Black women. The speech was entitled entitled "We Are All Bound Up Together," in which she spoke about white suffragists, saying "I do not believe that White women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent...You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs."
After Harper delivered this speech, the National Woman's Rights Convention agreed to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). It incorporated Black suffrage into the Women's Suffrage Movement. AERA was short-lived, ending when Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which would grant Black men the right to vote. Some of AERA's suffragists, did not support the Amendment's aim to enfranchise Black men without extending suffrage rights to women. Harper, on the other hand, not wanting to undermine the progress of Black men supported the Fifteenth Amendment.
After the Civil War, Frances moved South and worked as a teacher for newly-freed Black people. In her encounters with them, she learned firsthand of the hardships they endured during Reconstruction and expressed their stories through poems. These were eventually collected in her book "Sketches of Southern Life" (1872). She created a fictional ex-slave named Aunt Chloe to serve as a narrator in some of these touching works. Harper also published books throughout this period, including, "The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems" (1894), and her well-known novel "Iola Leroy".
"Iola Leroy" is one of the first novels published by a Black woman in the United States. The book tells of her struggles of being separated from her mother, her search for work, and her experience with racist boundaries in nineteenth-century society. The book, like the rest of Harper's career, intertwined the issues of racism, classism, and sexism that otherwise may not have been recognized as related and intersecting. From 1883 to 1890 she was in charge of activities among Blacks for the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She wrote numerous poems on the evils of alcohol.
She became a director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth in 1894. In 1896, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women with other Black women activists, serving as its vice president in 1897. She was also a devoted member of the Unitarian Church. During the course of her career, she experimented with new literary styles; published more than a dozen books and countless articles and essays; and was the most popular Black poet of her time, earning her the nickname "Bronze Muse. Harper's straightforward style of writing may have contributed to her popularity and her revolutionary success.