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8. Frances Harper’s Poverty Relief Mission in the African American Community
- The University of Alabama Press
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Throughout most of her works, especially her novel Iola Leroy, Frances E. W. Harper consistently toils to address her concerns over the uplifting of her race. There is no doubt that at the center of this uplifting is the end of poverty and oppression of all kinds. Harper knows that a poor person is a depressed person, one incapable of reaching his or her highest potential. Harper also knows that in order to better the race as a whole, poverty must be eliminated—or, at the very least, signi¤cantly altered. Harper herself was a woman with an education and a comfortable upbringing who taught school in her early years and developed into an advocate of many social causes of her day, including abolition, temperance , and the importance of education. She was an active member of many political and social organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the American Women’s Suffrage Association, and the American Equal Rights Association. She was a good Christian woman who attempted to practice her faith in her daily life. She believed in—and lived by—many of the tenets of the popular Cult of True Womanhood. She was, in other words, in many ways typical of a certain type of privileged woman in nineteenth-century America. Harper was aware of both the privileges that had been allotted her and the struggles that she would continually encounter. She dealt with this dichotomy by channeling her privileges into a deep sense of responsibility toward helping other, less privileged African Americans. 8 Frances Harper’s Poverty Relief Mission in the African American Community Terry D. Novak Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, to free parents who died when Harper was still a toddler. Harper was raised and educated by her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, who owned and ran the William Watkins Academy for Colored Youth. It was there that Harper was formally educated until she reached the age of thirteen. While many of her white counterparts— that is to say, those women of an upper class within their race—would have found this an absurdly abbreviated formal education, as many of them were able to attend female colleges and seminaries, Harper realized her fortune as a black woman in being able to attain such a high level of education. Harper left school to become a domestic and to train to become a seamstress. She continued her intellectual education informally at the home of her employer, who allowed her free access to the family’s extensive library. In 1851 she was hired by Union Seminary, an Ohio school run by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, to teach sewing. Harper left this position within a year’s time and moved to another teaching position in Pennsylvania. Unlike the women Lori Merish discusses at length in her essay on the “Sentimental Seamstress” in this volume, Harper did not become dependent on the economic vagaries of her work as a seamstress or on her teaching of such. Rather, she took an interesting—and necessary— approach to her foray into the world of the seamstress. She ¤rst used the skill as a means of support; she then used the skill as a means to help other African American women support themselves; and she then combined the teaching skills and survival skills she had learned with the “book learning”she had been able to acquire to step into the role she felt to be her true calling. When Harper abandoned her second teaching position in 1854, she began to lecture against slavery and to assist with the Underground Railroad movement. This work, which was to set the frame for her life’s work, was propelled by the 1853 passage of a law in Harper’s home state of Maryland, stating that free blacks who entered the state were subject to enslavement. Harper’s public work was interrupted for a period of four years, while she was married to Fenton Harper. The death of Fenton Harper, while economically disastrous to his wife on many levels, also freed Frances Harper to return to her work, this time with the accompaniment of her 214 Terry D. Novak young daughter and her three stepchildren, on the lecture circuit. Although Harper surely would consider her lecture work of supreme importance , she was also establishing herself as a popular poet as well as a short story and essay writer even before her marriage to Fenton Harper. But in all...