SOURCE: '"Whatever Concerns Them, as a Race, Concerns Me': The Oratorical Careers of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sarah Parker Remond," in "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880), Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 119-45.

In the following excerpt, Peterson analyzes the cultural contexts surrounding Harper's poetry, seeing her writing as an "experimental activity" that appropriated the nineteenth-century discourse of sentimentality and broke down social distinctions between public and private spheres.

Poetry—in both its recited and printed forms—was … an experimental activity for Watkins Harper, serving as a structural frame through which she could fashion herself in the public role of poet-preacher in order to articulate her vision of nineteenth-century America. In accordance with Unitarian literary theory, in which the British novelist Maria Edgeworth and poet Felicia Hemans were put forth as models of good taste, Watkins Harper conceived of poetry...