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133 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Duty to Dependent Races (Speech to the National Council of Women of the United States) Poet, author, lecturer, and reformer, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the most influential African American women of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Highly regarded for her oratorical poetry and poetic oratory, Harper spoke on behalf of abolition, civil rights, women’s rights, and temperance. 1 “Duty to Dependent Races,” a speech delivered in support of equal rights for African Americans to the reform-minded and activist National Council of Women, represents Harper’s work at its finest. The speech is simultaneously logical and pointedly argued while expressed in a style that is highly polished. That speeches such as these, powerful and rhetorically strategic, could not mobilize stronger support for African American rights from the women’s reform movement explains the frustration that many African American women felt when working with their white sisters for women’s rights. Frances Ellen Watkins was born a free black in the city of Baltimore in 1825. Orphaned at the age of three, she was reared by her aunt and uncle, William Watkins. The latter ran William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth and was a leader in the African American intellectual community of Baltimore, including the East Baltimore Improvement Society, a group whose meetings Frederick Douglass attended while a working as a slave at the shipyards. In her uncle’s school, Frances studied the Bible, the classics, and elocution. She went to work as a domestic at the age of thirteen, and in her employer’s home was provided full access to the family library. Drawing upon this combination of formal and informal education, in 1846, Frances Watkins published her first book of poetry, Forest Leaves, at the age of twenty-one. In Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 134 1850, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Frances moved north and began teaching school. In 1854, she published her second volume of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, and left teaching to become a paid lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. Such lecturers were typically provided with a small beginning stipend and a travel itinerary of towns and venues at which to speak. From there, they were expected to support themselves financially through receipts at the door, passing the collection plate, or relying upon the generosity of local abolitionists. A noted essayist and poet, Frances Watkins was such a successful lecturer that she was not only able to support herself, but could contribute liberally to the Underground Railroad.2 At one point, she asked that she be allowed to help personally with the transportation of fugitive slaves, but William Still responded that Watkins’s financial contributions were so important to the organization that he requested she continue her labors in that field.3 In 1860, Frances married Fenton Harper and retired from the lecture circuit, after which the couple purchased a farm in Columbus, Ohio, largely from her earnings.4 When Fenton Harper died in 1864, the farm was sold involuntarily to pay off outstanding debts—since the bank assumed that a widow could not financially afford the loan—and Frances moved with her daughter to New England, where she continued her writing and resumed her lecture tours. In the latter half of the century, she published one novel (Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted, 1892) and multiple volumes of poetry (Sketches of Southern Life, 1872; Moses: A Story of the Nile, 1889; The Sparrow’s Fall and Other Poems, 1894; and Atlanta Offerings: Poems, 1895). Her speeches on her lecture tours during these years generally focused on either “moral law”—covering topics such as moral improvement, temperance, thrift, and industry—or “political law”—including universal suffrage for African Americans and women as well as full equal rights under the law.5 In addition to her writing and lecturing, Harper served as a member of and often an officer in a variety of leading women’s organizations of the day, such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Congress of Colored Women in the United States, the National Council of Negro Women, and the American Equal Rights Association. The audience for “Duty to Dependent Races” is one such organization—the National Council of Women in the United States. Growing out of the International Council of Women conference held in 1888, reform-minded women in America decided to form a National Council of Women of the United States (NCW). Led by...

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