Frances E. W. Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a poet, abolitionist, temperance activist, and suffragist. As a child, she attended Watkins Academy, her uncle’s school, in Baltimore, Maryland. She spent much of her adult life in Philadelphia, where she published her poetry and Iola Leroy, one of the first novels published by an African American. 

Harper advocated for equal rights for the remainder of her life. She went on to become the co-founder and vice president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and the superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia Women’s Christian Temperance Union.