Chapter 3. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry

2012 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Keyword(s):  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

“Not Another ‘Poetess’”: Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Lootens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Crisis Intervention ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Nineteenth Century Poetry

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.

“Polluted Luxuries”: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
Market Society ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Consumer Resistance ◽  
Antebellum Literature ◽  
The Senses

AbstractThis essay examines the unique positionality of abolitionist boycott literature, situated within the sentimental trends of antebellum literature while employing the sensationalist language of consumer interaction with morally compromised goods. Boycott literature ultimately introduced into the literary landscape a complicated view of what readers and writers increasingly saw as a suspect “free” market. Writers such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, and John Greenleaf Whittier imagined a world of goods haunted by the touch of enslaved laborers—goods that in turn haunted consumers. By parsing out the language of abolitionist boycott literature alongside its historical and material cultural moment, this essay argues that such literature posits a very literal and as yet unaccounted-for version of material relations that collapses the boundaries between consumer and producer, self and other, in ways that have horrific, haunting implications for market society, then and now.

A Tale of Two Franceses—Temperance and Suffragism in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 358-394
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Woman's Christian Temperance Union ◽  
Black And White ◽  
International Labor ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
International Labor Movement ◽  
Frances Willard

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.

Disaffected

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xine Yao
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ◽  
Sui Sin Far ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Face ◽  
Duke University

In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader.

1992 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 830
Author(s):  
John Ernest ◽  
Frances Smith Foster ◽  
Catherine Golden ◽  
Rebecca Harding Davis
Keyword(s):  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

The Two Offers by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

1979 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Diane S. Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
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