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    A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother"
    A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother"
    A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother"
    Ebook40 pages50 minutes

    A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535839594
    A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother"

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      A Study Guide for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Slave Mother" - Gale

      13

      The Slave Mother

      Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

      1854

      Introduction

      Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who was one of the most notable African American poets of the nineteenth century, wrote The Slave Mother in 1854. This poem was initially published in Harper's second book of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, also in 1854. The Slave Mother is a forty-line poem, divided into ten four-line stanzas, using a ballad format. The poem focuses on the anguish a slave mother feels when her young child is sold and is forever lost to her. Harper humanizes the pain that the mother feels at the loss of her son and creates empathy and outrage at the plight of this mother, who has the feelings of any other mother, whether black or white. The poem emphasizes the effect of racism on families and the pain of loss for a mother whose son is being sold. Harper was an ardent antislavery abolitionist. In the early 1850s, she worked for the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia.

      When The Slave Mother was published in 1854, Harper was already well known as an activist who traveled frequently lecturing about the need to outlaw slavery. The poem reveals Harper's outrage at the sale of a child who is regarded as property to be sold for profit. Although Harper was born a free woman and was never a slave, she was very aware of the degradation and dehumanization associated with slavery. Rather than ignore slavery, Harper chose to confront this injustice and use her talent to write poetry as a way to condemn slavery and those who would engage in the sale of people as property. The Slave Mother is included in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, published in 1990, and in Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper, published in 1988.

      Author Biography

      Little is know of Harper's childhood or her family. She was born Frances Ellen Watkins on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland. The names of her parents are unknown. Her mother died before she was three, and her father was not a part of her life. Watkins was likely her mother's maiden name. Because few exact details are known, much of Watkins's early life must be extrapolated from contemporary accounts of her activities, which described her as mulatto in color. Mulatto is a term used to describe African Americans of mixed black and white parentage; therefore, her father was probably white.

      Watkins was raised by

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