Frances then urged attendees to include black women in the fight for the vote, saying  "We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul."

 

We are still getting push back on this idea today. Frances is a great model for how we need to work from every angle.

 

Frances was born September 24, 1825, to free black parents in Baltimore, Maryland. Though Maryland was a slave state, Baltimore's free black community was one of the largest in the country, and birthed a fervent abolitionist movement. Frances' parents died when she was three years old, so Frances was raised by her mother's sister and her husband Henrietta and William Watkins.

Frances went to school until she was 13-years-old, an age when free black girls often went to work for white families. Frances was lucky to get a job with a family who owned a bookstore. Employed as a seamstress and nanny in their home, she was allowed to spend whatever free time she had in the bookstore. In her teen years she began writing poetry, and at age twenty published a small book of poems entitled Forest Leaves. She continued her education at every opportunity. 

 

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, sending a jolt through free black communities. Frances became one of many who moved away from Maryland to put distance between themselves and slave catchers who kidnapped free blacks and sold them to slave owners in the south.

 

Soon after getting her bearings in Ohio, Francis began aiding enslaved people who escaped on the Underground Railroad and writing articles for abolitionist newspapers. She continued to write and publish poetry, as well as penning The Two Offers, the first short story published in the U.S. by a black woman. It examined the question of whether spinsterhood might offer more benefit than getting married simply to escape becoming an old maid. 

 

Frances discovered she could be an skilled and compelling speaker. She spent the late 1850s, traveling throughout the Northeast and parts of the Midwest campaigning against slavery. It was during this time that she ran into racist segregation on trains and trolleys, suffering abuse from conductors when she refused to give up her seat in the whites only car.

 

At one speech she related her journey from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. "They put me in the smoking car! They did it once; but the next time they tried it, they failed; for I would not go in."

 

Smoking cars, of course, were not fit places for a lady. Male passengers not only smoked, but drank, gambled and swore. Frances wanted to continue the fight, but the constant indignities and insults wore on her.

 

Perhaps this figured in her decision to get married, which she did in November 1960, to a farmer Fenton Harper. They had a daughter, but their marriage was short-lived.

 

Here's the story in her own words that formed the background for passion for equal rights for women. 

Today inequality continues to make life difficult for women and children, especially since Covid-19 hit.

 

According to research from the Economic Policy Institute, frontline jobs, those most often deemed “essential” and require people to work in-person, are heavily staffed by women, including 73 percent of government and community-based services workers, 76 percent of health care workers, and 78 percent of social workers.

 

As of this week, US billionaire wealth up $850 billion or 29% in the first six months of the pandemic. Needless to say, most American women cannot relate. Billionaires are overwhelmingly white men.

 

Something has to change. I'm thrilled for black and brown women to have someone who looks like them running in this national election and showing leadership at a time when we so desperately need it.

 

Thanks to Anne, for this week's book recommendation: The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu. Anne called this "a tough but wonderful book about a man of Mexican heritage who worked as a border patrol officer. True and hard story but so worth reading, especially at this time. "

 

Another timely book, new out this week, Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy by Kenneth C. Davis.

This book is written for young people ages 12-18, which is code for adults will love it too!

 

The book earned a stared review from Kirkus.