Women of Distinction: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Abstract

Frances Ellen Watkins was born in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1825, not of slave parentage but subjected to the oppressive influence which bond and free alike endured under slave laws. Her childhood days were desolate. Sentences from her own pen express the loneliness of those days. “Have I yearned for a mother’s love? The grave was my robber. Before three years had scattered their blight around my path death had won my mother from me.