Harper, Historiography, and the Race/Gender Opposition in Feminism

Abstract

AbstractWhy is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper not a legendary figure within American feminism in the same way that Sojourner Truth is? This essay suggests that the difference in feminist standing between these two nineteenth-century activists can be traced to the historiographical construction of a particular moment within suffrage history: the 1869 “split” within the movement, in which suffragists disagreed about whether to support or denounce the Fifteenth Amendment and the enfranchisement of black men ahead of women. These “split-narratives,” as I call them, pair Harper with Truth as black women who had to “choose” between privileging either their race or their sex in the face of the amendment and the debates it sparked in the suffrage movement. I argue that it is the critical attachment to the split and its attendant need to understand how historical figures reacted to the divide that effaces Harper’s career as a writer-activist and the feminist theorizing that can be drawn from her work. Through readin...