ere made possible due to the post-war social changes, much more effort is required for the whole race to succeed. Many contemporary critics notice that Harper's use of the genre of a sentimental novel is, indeed, conventional:
             It is true that African-American women often fit their writing into what to many contemporary readers seems like conventional generic shells. Their valorization of motherhood, their endorsements of marriage and traditional women's concerns like temperance, and their novelistic use of racially indeterminate protagonists, all characterize later nineteenth-century Black women's writing. Their commitment to these concerns was genuine and political (...).
             On the other hand, critics emphasize that the use of such a genre helped Harper to include the social and political slogans she propagated, which at the same time enabled her to direct the novel towards both black and white communities – as Gabrielle Foreman writes in her essay –
             (...) Frances Harper had her finger on the pulse of the activist
             ...