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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4315-3325
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Afro-American Studies
Year Degree Awarded
2021
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Manisha Sinha
Second Advisor
John Bracey
Third Advisor
Irene B. Krauthamer
Fourth Advisor
Laura Lovett
Subject Categories
African American Studies | Africana Studies | United States History | Women's History | Women's Studies
Abstract
This dissertation examines the life and activism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and provides a thorough biographical study of the nineteenth century Black woman writer and activist. Watkins Harper was born free in Baltimore in 1825 and became one of very few Black women antislavery lecturers during the 1850s. As an employed agent for various antislavery societies, she traveled extensively throughout the Northern parts of the United States to speak in front of mixed interracial audiences about the need to abolish slavery. After the Civil War, Watkins Harper continued her extensive lecturing tours, this time speaking to Northern and Southern audiences about the importance of achieving Black citizenship rights for the country’s newly free Black population. In the mid-1870s, Watkins Harper turned her attention towards the temperance movement and became a member of the largest women’s organization at the time, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. By 1883, the writer-activist was nominated as the WCTU’s national superintendent for Work among African Americans in the North, traveling across the country to speak to predominately Black audiences about temperance, voting rights, and racial uplift. While she campaigned tirelessly for racial and gender equality throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Watkins Harper also produced countless literary productions, such as poems, serialized novels, and short narratives, thus establishing herself as one of the most celebrated Black women writers of her time. Watkins Harper passed away in 1911 and left behind a remarkable legacy as a writer and an activist, allowing for a unique microstudy of one of the most prominent Black women of the 1800s.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/24593517
Recommended Citation
Ortner, Johanna Maria, ""Whatever concerns them, as a race, concerns me": The Life and Activism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper" (2021). Doctoral Dissertations. 2289.
https://doi.org/10.7275/24593517
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2289
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.