Black National Housekeeping: Domesticity as Public Health in the Post-Reconstruction Works of Frances E. W. Harper

Abstract: “Health in the home is health everywhere,” domestic advice author Mrs. Hariette Merrick Plunkett writes in the 1885 Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or, Household Sanitation , thereby rendering public health inextricable from domestic hygiene. Following Plunkett’s lead, scholars of United States literature and culture have unearthed compelling, comprehensive accounts of the overlapping histories of domesticity, sanitary reform, and public health, yet they do not fully attend to the racial dimensions of domesticity-as-public health throughout the nineteenth century. By bringing together nineteenth-century domestic hygiene literature, black activist author Frances E. W. Harper’s public lectures on race and gender equality, and her 1892 novel Iola Leroy , this article demonstrates how Harper repurposes traditionally white narratives of domesticity as narratives of black national belonging in the years following the US Civil War. When read together, I argue, these texts reveal a long history of black women’s domestic labor, which allows Harper to rewrite narratives of domesticity-as-public health as narratives of black national belonging. Situating Harper’s public lectures and prose fiction within the existing canon of domesticity, domestic hygiene, and public health texts, this article complicates existing literary-historical accounts of US public health history. It offers to scholars and students of literature and medicine and the health humanities a way to critically engage racially diverse histories of domesticity and public health.