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This chapter examines how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, from her early invocation of the specter of the Poetess on the auction block to her late replacement of earlier “heart” tropes with the figure of Harriet Tubman's bruised hands, deploys Poetess performance as a powerful, if ultimately insufficient, resource for articulating poetic visions of globally aware, politically ambitious African American intellectual culture. Building on Harper's own self-depiction as “our most celebrated poetess and oratrix,” the chapter considers the strenuousness and virtuosity of her engagements with “separate spheres.” It also explores how, through the “click of the cliché,” Harper corporealizes her narrator Chloe Fleet's well-known challenges to slaveholding domesticity. Finally, it analyzes two poems that seek to break the bounds of haunted, suspended spheres: “Do Not Cheer, Men are Dying” and “The Vision of the Czar of Russia.”

This chapter examines how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper deployed motherhood—in which the mother's body becomes "two" via her child—to advocate for African American women's equality. It concentrates on two complications in Watkins Harper's poetry which speak to how violent forces dismantle or differently assemble the individual: first, slaves were private possessions, not people; and, second, encumbered or extended by their children's bodies, mothers were forbidden the self-circumscription that constituted liberal selfhood. By reflecting how mothers' bodies and the children attached to those bodies were broken down into publicly saleable parts, Watkins Harper's poetry contravenes liberalism's notions of singular self-possession. Rather than focusing on the institution of slavery and its denial of such self-possession to African American women, this chapter dwells with Watkins Harper on how the connection between disembodiment and motherhood results in multi-bodied mothers who exceed the boundaries of a singular subject. By expanding the terms of liberalism's singular self-possession, Watkins Harper symbolically gathers up the maternal body and all the other bodies it supports into a sovereign whole through the "body" of the poem.

Chapter 13 examines the Reconstruction Era struggle for women’s rights and African American rights through the American Equal Rights Association, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), especially the WCTU activism of acclaimed black writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Born of the so-called Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873–1974, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU would become the most successful woman’s organization of all time. Willard’s Do Everything campaign expanded women’s activism, both nationally and globally. Despite racial tensions within the WCTU, temperance activism provided the main avenue of political organization for women across the Reconstruction-Era South, both black and white. By the 1890s Willard had made common cause between not just temperance, equal rights, antilynching leagues, and suffragist movements, but—as a Christian socialist—with both the domestic and international labor movement as well.

This chapter shows how African American poet Frances Harper Harper explicitly transnationalizes the question of freedom and humanity for African Americans in the nineteenth century. In a country torn between a national rhetoric of freedom and a social and economic dependency on slavery, she offered a vision of a free black republic, evoking the history of what would become a celebrated symbol of struggle against colonial imperialism—the Republic of Palmares. Four decades later, in the aftermath of a failed Reconstruction leading to racial violence and the exclusion of blacks from United States citizenship, Harper wrote about a black Cuban leader who fought to quell racial conflict in his country for the sake of national unity and independence. She suggests that the scope of African American experience extends beyond regional and national boundaries. Well before the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude movements popularized internationalism in poetry, Harper began using poetry to challenge African Americans to conceptualize identity beyond national borders. Harper’s appropriations of Zumbi and Maceo are signs not only of Harper’s Pan-African sensibility but also of her early transnational African American poetics, a poetics demanding a certain kind of critical analysis—one that recognizes the permeability of national boundaries.

This chapter offers a reading of Frances E. W. Harper's novel Trial and Triumph, serialized in the newspaper Christian Recorder in 1888–1889. Trial and Triumph, believed to be an autobiography, tells the story of a black girl who comes of age in an urban city in the North in the post-Civil War years. The protagonist rejects marriage and overcomes numerous losses in her early life, charting her own course and becoming a professional woman who travels south to educate the black masses. Harper's text was written with the goal of promoting change within the homes of black families. This chapter examines what material from her own life Harper included in her story and what kind of preparation for the future she presented for northern black girls in the 1880s. It also considers interiority and the issue of race as themes of Trial and Triumph and concludes by assessing Harper's vision of the potential opportunities for black girls who establish themselves in activist careers before they marry.

The two most widely known African American poets before the 20th century were Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Harper was an accomplished elocutionist and Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and other lyceum circuit lectures are now classic texts of American literature. Dunbar's performances were of a quite different nature. He was opinionated and outspoken on social and political issues and his readings were straightforward recitals of his poems, which were written in dialect and standard traditional stanzaic forms. However, Harper' practice was aimed at the harmonious alignment of head and heart. The invention of a characteristic voice was needed to carry Harper's message and to bridge the cultural distance between Standard English and black dialect.

“Reconstructing Secularisms” describes how turn-of-the-century arguments over the boundaries of literary realism were inextricably linked to the politics of secularism. This chapter follows tropes of religious excess as they circulate throughout realist fiction, from William Dean Howells’s interlocking diagnoses of racial and religious hysteria in An Imperative Duty (1891) to W. E. B. Du Bois’s more ambivalent description of the “frenzy” of the black church in “Of the Coming of John,” his early experiment with realist narrative in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Resonating through such descriptions is a question about the aesthetic and political function of ecstasy in the aftermath of Reconstruction. While Howells depicts the black church as a site of emotional and bodily excess, Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892) and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) radically challenge this formation, offering an important take on the uses of ecstatic collectivity. They also gesture to the imminent secularism of literary history, which has largely omitted these texts from the boundaries of realism, perhaps in part because they articulate a critical relationship to secularism as a silent but hegemonic force in the Jim Crow era’s hysterical regulation of racial difference.

This chapter examines true womanhood in relation to white womanhood within the framework of a dialectical and exclusionary relationship to black womanhood. It looks at how early black feminists sought to reclaim the black female body and promoted a noble black womanhood that acknowledged the realities of African American women’s lived experience. Focusing on the novels of Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, Iola Leroy (1892) and Contending Forces (1899), respectively, it explores existing notions of racial difference and argues that Harper and Hopkins represent the mulatta as passing for a “true woman.” It also considers Judith Butler’s notion of identity as performative and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s rhetorical theory of African American signifying before concluding with a discussion of the “double-voiceness” of Iola Leroy and Contending Forces.

This chapter discusses black biblical interpretation between 1865 and the Nadir. It analyzes the interpretive activity of two prominent figures: Frances E. W. Harper and John Jasper. In the wake of the Civil War's radical disruption of the South's slave economy, and amid the promise of Reconstruction, Harper's Moses: Story of the Nile, published in 1869, shows optimism about the possibilities for black life. In the epic poem she fashions a Moses with virtues of the politics of respectability and commends him to the black community as the key to racial uplift. Nine years later, after any hopes of the promise of Reconstruction had been eroded, John Jasper, the towering pastoral figure of Richmond, Virginia, takes Exodus 13:5 and preaches his renowned sermon, “The Sun Do Move.” Defiant rather than optimistic, Jasper's pillar of fire politics rejects the truth claims of the new scientific discourses from which African Americans have been barred access.

This chapter examines the role of women of African descent in the poetic re-imagining of the post-abolition “Americas” through a close, comparative analysis of Frances Harper and Cristina Ayala. Ayala and Harper posit a reconciled relationship of African descendants with the racist nation-state. This reconciliation opens the door for active participation in the ideological and symbolic re-imagining of the nation. They suggest that the spectre of slavery extended beyond the particular experience of slavery as defined by national regions. Ayala and Harper’s use of biblical typology—Ayala through the figure of Christ and Harper through the Exodus—demonstrate an early form of secular typology in the framing of a collective history of African descendants in the New World. Both poems inscribe a narrative of freedom. They propose a particular way of envisioning the emancipation of peoples of African descent in Cuba and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), representative black domestic novels, the genre that 1980s and 1990s black feminism used to usher black women’s literature into the canon. Refusing to treat black domestic fiction as a response to black women’s exclusion from the cult of true womanhood, this chapter highlights the trope of homemade citizenship, which has been overlooked because readers assume artistic works either protest injustice or ignore the reasons for protest. Both novels revolve around racial uplift, and because they define it as collective practices of making-oneself-at-home, they highlight the importance of the community conversation to help black women claim their right to every aspect of success, including romantic love. [121 of 125 words]

This chapter examines the contention by women's rights activists that every individual should be given an equal opportunity to navigate his or her own voyage of life. It considers the temporal idea of maturation and womanhood that challenged the spatial metaphors of separate spheres for the sexes and segregation for the races, as well as the use of chronological age to define the rights and duties of older Americans. More specifically, it analyzes the argument that age twenty-one must become a transition to full citizenship for all Americans. Finally, it discusses the views of Frances Harper and Sojourner Truth regarding the moral maturity of black women.

This chapter examines struggles to define relations between “Victorian femininity” and racialized Poetess reception, focusing in particular on early, explicitly racialized meditations on the loss of African American Poetess figures. Drawing on foundational Second Wave feminist texts such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Cora Kaplan's Salt and Bitter and Good, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, Erlene Stetson's Black Sister, and Cheryl Walker's Nightingale's Burden, the chapter investigates how early strains in Second Wave thinking came to define feminist criticism itself as a politicized mode of crisis intervention. It also considers how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper came to be barred, explicitly, from the category of “poetess” and concludes with a reading of Alice Walker's 1976 Poetess novel Meridian.

This chapter examines the ways in which Cristina Ayala and Frances Harper’s work demonstrates the interdependence of slavery and freedom. It demonstrates how the problematic relationship between freedom and slavery appears at the level of the poetic line. In distinct ways, each poem uses symbolism and allegory to explore concepts of racial, national, and gender, freedoms. Although the poems differ formally and thematically in a number of ways, each features a precarious freedom that relies on the symbology of slavery to define itself. The chapter also ultimately maintains not that the Cuban and North American historical contexts and literature are identical, but rather that the prerogative of “race,” gender and nationalism in post-abolition Cuba and post-abolition United States was inflected by a series of interlocking ideas. This interlocking produced a similar set of rhetorical and literary responses to them.

For white men, conscription posed a racially destabilizing proximity to enslavement; for African Americans, it opened up possibilities of citizenship and inclusion in the state’s population. Analyzing the recruitment efforts of Frederick Douglass, this chapter pushes back against critical race theory’s near-universally dim view of state power, and argues that military service held positive value for free black people and recently freed slaves. At the same time, the chapter draws on critical race theory to show how Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) countered the racialization of biopower. Set during the war and its aftermath, the novel is structured—like the draft—by a narrative logic of substitution, which recurs at the level of character and plot. Harper offers a wide spectrum of the wartime experience of African Americans, who saw in the draft—as in military service more broadly—a chance for state recognition as fully participating civic actors.

In contrast to white soldiers, who were largely able to take the concepts of manhood and citizenship for granted, soldiers in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) struggled to prove to society not only that they were men but also that they were worthy of the rights of citizenship. During the early postwar years, veterans of the USCT used their war service to great rhetorical advantage to access economic and political power. With the end of southern Reconstruction, this power gradually eroded; even as white veteran became more vocal about their service in the war, black voices had begun to fade. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, USCT veterans had lost enough of their social prestige that even black civilians such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper sought for new non-martial role models to aid in the cause of racial uplift.

This chapter describes how the most significant Civil War writing was retrospective. The literary surge of Civil War remembering began, it seems, with the drying of the ink on General Robert E. Lee's April 9, 1865 surrender. This prodigious production continued to the end of the decade and beyond. Indeed, the need for imaginative recollection of this momentous event was intensified by historical distance, so that a writer in 1998 could describe the Civil War as still “unfinished.” In this sense, the chief cultural effect of the Civil War was to keep Americans permanently fixed in the four years of traumatic conflict. The array of novels and memoirs published in the decades after the war by such varied and prominent authors as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry James, and Ulysses S. Grant lend support to this view.