Chapter 15 - Frances Harper’s Reconstruction

Summary

In Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s early Reconstruction novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Minnie asks her husband Louis, “When they are reconstructing the government why not lay the whole foundation anew, and base the right to suffrage not on the claims of service or sex, but on the broader basis of our common humanity.” Louis tells her “we are not prepared for it. This hour belongs to the negro,” to which she replies “is it not the negro woman’s hour also?”¹ Here Minnie reflects on the difficult decision posed to Black women suffragists:

I cannot recognize that the negro man is the only one who has pressing claims at this hour. To-day our government needs woman’s conscience as well as man’s judgment. And while I would not throw a straw in the way of the colored man, even though I know that he would vote against me as soon as he gets his vote, yet I do think that woman should have some power to defend herself from oppression, and equal law as if she were a man.

(78)

Harper frames Reconstruction as a family affair, focusing on the Black communities who would navigate national postbellum shifts as their collective, communal work. It is fitting that she casts her two novels depicting Reconstruction – Minnie’s Sacrifice and Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) – as national family romances. Notions of Black family and community are central to how her characters navigate their gendered, racialized relationships to and place within a white supremacist nation.