A young black woman holds an I Voted sticker
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The connection between the temperance and women’s suffrage movements in America has been well documented. As the story goes, mid-to-late 19th century women seeking relief from the ideological scourge of drunk, abusive husbands banded together to ban the production and sale of alcohol. Empowered by their newfound political acumen, they then turned their sights to politicking for the right to vote. Their success can be seen in the ratification of the 18th and 19th amendments, in 1919 and 1920, respectively.
While not entirely inaccurate, this narrative overlooks the many, many cooperating and competing forces that wrangled over decades to bring about Prohibition and women’s right to vote. Perhaps most notable is the simultaneous and quite intertwined emergence of both campaigns, as well what some might view as the third pillar of the era’s push for reform: equal rights for Black people.
And while white names like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard endure among history’s leading pro-temperance suffragists, one efficacious but ultimately frustrated Black woman, born free in Maryland, notably took on all three crusades at once. Her name was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (AKA F.E.W. Harper) and though she bore the weight society loads onto those who live lives of marginalized intersectionality, she never stopped driving her triple goals of temperance, women’s suffrage and Black civil rights ever closer to the finish line.
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An orphan born in 1825 and raised by her educated aunt and uncle in Baltimore, Harper learned about the fight against slavery from her uncle, an active abolitionist, self-taught doctor and founder of a school. She read voraciously as a young person and left her home state in her 20s to teach. Not long after she moved out, the state of Maryland passed a law that barred free Northern African Americans from entering.
This exclusion incensed Harper, convincing her to devote her life to the anti-slavery cause and sending her on a lecture circuit where she shared the stage with the celebrated white feminist who would later become her compatriot in the fight for women’s right to vote, Susan B. Anthony.
In her 30s, she moved in with friends of her uncle, Philadelphians William and Letitia George Still, whose work led William to earn the moniker “Father of the Underground Railroad.” She began writing poetry in earnest, catching the attention of famous abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, then became the first Black woman to publish a short story.
The Francis Willard House Museum and Archives names her “the most prolific nineteenth-century African American novelist and the most beloved African American poet of her time.”
As she traveled throughout North America to speak out in favor of Black freedom, women’s rights and temperance, she published more articles about social justice. Though she’d written in favor of educated, independent women over the preceding years, she’d had her eyes opened wide to the need for suffrage when government agents repossessed her farm after her husband died in 1864. The law mandated their shared assets registered under his name.
“I say, then, that justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law,” she wrote in one of her pieces decrying female disenfranchisement.
In 1866, Harper gave her now-famous “We Are All Bound up Together” speech at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York, in which, according to the National Women’s History Museum, “She emphasized that Black women were facing the double burden of racism and sexism at the same time, therefore the fight for women’s suffrage must include suffrage for African Americans.”
She gave a piercing speech. Attacking the gathered white women for being as racist as their male counterparts for refusing to peel their attention away from temperance and women’s voting rights to temporarily prioritize the urgent post-war cause of Black male suffrage, she told the audience, “I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.”
She continued, “While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”
Then she walked off the stage.
“The next day,” notes the women’s history museum’s website, “the Convention held a meeting to organize the American Equal Rights Association to work for suffrage for both African Americans and women.”
This may mark the last time Harper won over a group of progressive whites so easily.
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The latter half of the 1860s brought the end of the Civil War and slavery then the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which, in theory, gave Black men equal rights under the law, including the right to vote.
As free men, they inherited the right to buy alcohol. And though Villanova University historian Mark Schrad writes in his upcoming book, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, that African-American drinking rates remained far lower than those of their white counterparts, Southern temperance soldiers frequently invoked the perceived threat of drunken Black men raping white women as a way to sway public opinion.
But Black women, including F.E.W. Harper, knew the truth. Far more pervasive were the mobs of drunk white men terrorizing Blacks.
In addition to the white-on-Black violence, many Black women worried their men might give into temptation to spend their time and money enslaved by the white man’s saloon.
“When I see intemperance send its floods of ruin and shame to the homes of men,” Harper wrote in her 1869 novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, through her main character, Minnie, “I long for the hour when woman’s vote will be leveled against these charnel houses; and have, I hope, the power to close them throughout the length and breadth of the land.”
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As Reconstruction waned and white supremacy rose, Harper continued to strongly believe her broad mission for social justice on behalf of Black women would be best served by joining forces with white women, who had access, influence and resources that those who shared her skin color didn’t.
But Harper had gone on record saying that if forced to choose between supporting women or Blacks, she’d choose race over gender. This led to her breaking ranks with former allies Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton when the organization they ran used racist language to oppose the 15th amendment, which gave suffrage to black men, until women won their own right to vote.
So when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) gained unprecedented dominance under Frances Willard in the 1880s and 1890s as it prayed, cajoled and shamed its way to bringing Prohibition to the people — and showed itself willing to take on most any fight to raise up the downtrodden — Harper again joined her white sisters on the warpath.
This, however, didn’t mean she entirely trusted its predominantly Caucasian membership to welcome her as an equal.
Alison Parker, in Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, quotes Harper as writing, “For years I knew very little of (WCTU) proceedings, and was not sure that colored comradeship was very desirable.”
According to a blog post on the Willard House website, despite that, “Harper believed that the WCTU offered ‘one of the grandest opportunities that God ever placed in the hands of the womanhood of any country.’”
“What drew (her) and other black women to the WCTU was its commitment to national legislation and federal solutions to moral and social problems in the United States,” adds Parker.
It took Harper little time to rise to the position of National Superintendent of the Department of “Colored Work in the North,” which, ironically, had the Philadelphian spending tireless hours traveling through the south to recruit Black women to the cause. She also traveled the country to lecture, form Black unions and youth groups and collect, compile and present data that informed the WCTU writings she then distributed along her sojourns.
Yet try as she might, she never fully succeeded in racially integrating the WCTU. Despite becoming American history’s most powerful women’s organization up to that point, the organization’s leadership claimed it couldn’t force integration on its chapters. Feeling ignored and underfunded, Harper grew increasingly frustrated. Then, after clashing with president Frances Willard over these issues, Willard demoted Harper’s department to one with far less autonomy and stripped her executive powers. Though Harper stayed on as a WCTU member, she began working with groups of political Black women, helping to form the National Association of Colored Women – with its own temperance unit — in 1896.
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In spite of her successive rebuffs, Harper kept touring and speaking for social reform, continuing to urge white women to not only welcome their Black sisters as full equals in their efforts but to do so by viewing Black Americans as contributing partners working to fully express their own agency rather than pitiable charity cases who needed saving.
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Though she remained well-known and respected into her old age, Harper’s views failed to generate much traction among women coming of age during the period when the 19th century begat the 20th.
“Harper’s leadership as the most prominent African American female reformer was eclipsed by the rise of a new leadership, which was mostly younger, well-educated, articulate, attractive, and extremely impatient with their white counterparts…the new leadership had a new organization (NACW) which provided a forum and base of support for their programs and ideas,” write Bettye Collier-Thomas and Ann D. Gordon in African American Women and The Vote, 1837-1965.**The so-named “Mother of Black Journalism,” the poet, the teacher, the author, the activist Frances Harper died in 1911 and was buried with her only child, a daughter, in Philadelphia.
Eight years later, the United States ratified the 18th amendment, ostensibly ridding the country of liquor producers and vendors. The year after that, the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote.
Though she would certainly celebrate these monumental achievements, she would likely feel deep disappointment to learn that in 1933, a 21st amendment overturned the 18th, and in 2020, as the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, her spiritual descendants still feel alienated and brutalized by white America, including its mainstream feminist causes. What’s more, her contributions, like those of so many historical women and African-Americans, now hover in the shadows of the more indelible white women and Black men who labored alongside her.
In a Harper biography written on July 24, 2020, the Willard House lamented, “The failures of white WCTU members to answer Harper’s call for ‘co-operation and active sympathy’ represented a lost opportunity for interracial collaboration and serves as a lesson for present and future reform movements.”
As exposed to Caucasians in the revolutionary summer of 2020, those reform movements have mountains of work to do to bring about true interracial collaboration. But tangible reason for hope lies in the political progress of Harper’s Black daughters and granddaughters. On August 5, the Center for American Women and Politics reported that, “Women of color have set new records for congressional candidacies in the 2020 elections.”