
In Frances E.W. Harper’s poem The Slave Mother, the element of the listener stuck out to me the most in the author’s way of advocating for social reform in the abolishment of slavery. I imagine one type of listener would have been the wives of abolitionist men and quite possibly even the wives of men who believed in the enforcement of slavery. I imagine these women, wives, were also mothers since in that time it was almost unheard of for a woman to be married and not bare any children for her husband without receiving some kind of social ridicule, so it makes sense that Frances Harper would write in the tone she does in this poem, successfully drawing similarities to a slave mother and her child to a white or freed mother and her children. In line 13, she writes “She is a mother, pale with fear, her boy clings to her side”. I think Harper so plainly stated that the owner of those heart wrenching shrieks was a mother to really grab the reader’s attention and make them realize they have a shared kinship in motherhood with this slave women, with whom it is so easy to unidentify with in all other aspects of their lives. She continues this notion further by expressing the widely known agony associated with childbirth that each and every mother at that time had to experience; pain does not discriminate. “ He is not hers, although she bore for him a mother’s pains; He is not hers, although her blood is coursing through his veins!” These lines may have deeply touched at the heart strings of listeners who were mothers because in this point in time, it was sadly very common for women to die during childbirth, yet millions of women chose to have more and more children knowing the great risk that went along with it, however the reward of having your child to love and care for greatly outweighed that risk. However, for this slave woman, who endured the same type of earth shattering pain and discomfort, she would not get to enjoy the harvest of her hard labor because her child would be stolen away to be sold in chains since the law of the day was that the child followed the condition of the mother. This poem draws a very clear picture of how it must have felt for a mother to experience losing her own flesh and blood, something that the white mothers probably never could nor had to imagine. Line 23 reads, “The only wreath of household love that binds her breaking heart”, thus describing the sentiments slave mothers must have felt towards their children, they were probably the only person on the plantation that truly loved them, especially if the father/ husband had been sold off to some other owner. I also think this touches on the role of women upheld by white people of the time with their placing an emphasis on the woman’s role in the household and how wives should seek their life’s fulfillment in raising and rearing the children. Slave mothers would miss out on this opportunity completely in the home. Overall, I think Harper’s ability to use her words to relate an idea and commonality to her female readers proved to be a large part of her poems success.