Page:Women of distinction.djvu/49

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WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.
13

better appreciated than here among these lowly people. I am now going to have a private meeting with the women of this place if they will come out. I am going to talk with them about their daughters, and about things connected with the welfare of the race. Now is the time for our women to begin to try to lift up their heads and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone."

Up to the time she returned to Philadelphia Mrs. Harper continued to write and discuss the condition of the ex-slave. She worked in home, in church, in Sunday-schools and on the public rostrum North and South; she was the constant advocate of the rights of an oppressed people.

Mrs. Harper has been one of our most energetic temperance workers, and has held sway with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union as no other Afro-American woman has ever done. Her work in this respect has given the race great prestige before the world.

A great and profound writer in both prose and poetry, a lecturer of no ordinary tact and ability, a master-hand at whatever she applies herself, she still lives at the time of this writing. Her pen is ever at work; her writings are many and varied.