Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State

A prominent early feminist, abolitionist, and civil rights advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote and spoke across genres and reform platforms during the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century. Her invention of a new commonplace language of moral character drew on the persuasive and didactic motifs of the previous decades of African-American reform politics, but far exceeded her predecessors in crafting lessons of rhetoric for women. Focusing on the way in which Harper brough...