Document 14.3 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, On Suffrage, 1869

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper | On Suffrage, 1869

Born a free person of color in Baltimore, Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper distinguished herself as a poet, a teacher, and an abolitionist. After the Civil War, she became a staunch advocate of women’s suffrage and a supporter of the Fifteenth Amendment, which set her at odds with the suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In this discussion at the May 1869 American Equal Rights Association meeting, she argues for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Image courtesy of Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries

When it was a question of race, she [black women] let the lesser question of sex go. But the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position. She liked the idea of working women, but she would like to know if it was broad enough to take colored women? . . . [When I] was at Boston there were sixty women who left work because one colored woman went to gain a livelihood in their midst. If the nation could only handle one question, I would not have the black women put a single straw in the way, if only the men of the race could obtain what they wanted.

Source: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Women’s Suffrage, 1861–1876 (Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1882), 2:391–92.

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