Her poem “Eliza Harris,” was published in The Liberator, and in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Supported by the Stills, Harper began writing poetry for antislavery newspapers. William Still became known as the father of the Underground Railroad while he was an office clerk and janitor in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Harper moved in with William and Letitia George Still who were abolitionists and friends of her uncle. She decided to devote all of her efforts to the antislavery cause. Harper was now unable to return to her own home. If found, they would be imprisoned and sold into slavery. Shortly after she began working as a teacher, her home state of Maryland passed a law stating that free African Americans living in the North were no longer allowed to enter the state of Maryland. She taught domestic science for a year and then moved to a school in York, Pennsylvania. When she was twenty-six years old, Harper left Maryland and became the first woman instructor at Union Seminary, a school for free African Americans in Wilberforce, Ohio. By age twenty-one, Harper wrote her first small volume of poetry called Forest Leaves. Her love for books blossomed as she spent any free time she had in the shop. Harper took a job as a nursemaid and seamstress for a white family that owned a bookshop. At that age, children were typically expected to join the workforce.

Frances Harper learned from her uncle’s activism and she attended the Watkins Academy until she was thirteen years old. Her uncle was an outspoken abolitionist, practiced self-taught medicine, organized a black literary society and established his own school in 1820 called the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Harper’s aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins, raised her after her parent’s death. Unfortunately, by the time she was three years old, both of her parents died and she became an orphan. An only child, Harper was born to free African American parents. Not only was she the first African American woman to publish a short story, but she was also an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and reformer that co-founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.įrances Ellen Watkins Harper was born on Septemin Baltimore, Maryland. As a poet, author, and lecturer, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a household name in the nineteenth century.

Frances E. W. Harper by Utz McKnight