Editing Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (section)

== Early Life and Education ==

Frances Ellen Watkins was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, a free Black woman in a slave state whose precarious liberty shaped her later commitment to those still enslaved. Her education at the academy run by her uncle William Watkins, a prominent minister and educator, provided intellectual foundation that most African Americans—and most American women—of her era were denied. Her early work as a domestic servant and teacher demonstrated the limited opportunities that even educated Black women faced.<ref name="carby">{{cite book |last=Carby |first=Hazel V. |title=Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist |year=1987 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York}}</ref>

Her relocation to Ohio and then to Pennsylvania in the 1850s brought her to the antislavery network that would provide both audience and purpose for her literary talents. Her employment with the Maine Anti-Slavery Society beginning in 1854 launched the lecturing career that would continue for decades. Her poem "The Slave Mother" and other antislavery verses demonstrated ability to reach audiences through emotional appeal that political argument alone could not achieve.<ref name="boyd"/>

Her marriage in 1860 to Fenton Harper, a widower with three children, briefly interrupted her public career, but his death in 1864 returned her to the platform where her abilities could serve the causes she championed. Her Philadelphia residence, which she maintained for much of her later life, provided base for activism that extended throughout the nation and for writing that addressed ongoing struggles for justice.<ref name="carby"/>