Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Born to free Black parents in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins was orphaned young and raised by an uncle who ran a school for free Black children, where she was educated until age 13. She published her first volume of poetry, Forest Leaves, around age 20, and around 1850 began teaching domestic science at Union Seminary in Ohio.

Shortly after she left Maryland, the state passed a law barring free Black people who had moved north from returning — under penalty of imprisonment and sale into slavery — which pushed Harper to dedicate herself fully to the antislavery cause. She spent the following years traveling and lecturing against slavery while continuing to write; her 1854 collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was reissued multiple times. Harper was also active in the temperance and suffrage movements, helped organize the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and published the novel Iola Leroy in 1892 — one of the first novels published by an African American woman. She lived in her Philadelphia home from 1870 until her death in 1911.

Key contributions

• One of the first African American women to be published, beginning in 1845.
• Toured extensively as an antislavery lecturer and essayist.
• Published Iola Leroy (1892), a novel addressing Reconstruction-era Black life.
• Helped organize the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and served as an officer.
• Led temperance work for the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union among Black communities.

Context

Harper wrote and spoke during a period when free Black communities in border states like Maryland faced tightening legal restrictions even outside of slavery itself, which shaped her decision to commit to abolitionist work full-time. Her later organizing placed her at the founding of the same national Black women's club movement that Mary Church Terrell would go on to lead.

In their spirit: Write it, say it, organize it — then do it all again in the next city.

About this set

Harper's card is one of six in Set 1A — First Flame Daughters, part of the Lineage: Origin Fire digital postcard collection. First Flame Daughters gathers women whose public courage and leadership lit the way for the movements that followed.

Shop the First Flame Daughters set or get the Complete Collection (all 12 cards).

Sources: National Park Service — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper House; Encyclopedia Britannica — Frances E.W. Harper.