Revisiting the enslaved poet’s work reveals how her imagination helped lay the groundwork for a Black feminist tradition that continues to challenge the limits of the American project.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
Phillis Wheatley (Peters) (c. 1753–84) has often been the recipient of deep celebration—as well as its opposite. For example, Margaret Walker, organizer of the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, memorialized her foremother in “Ballad for Phillis Wheatley,” a poem that imagines her as a “pretty little Black girl” despite the “shame” she was so often forced to bear. Walker’s sweet-tempered refrain stands out amongst a not-uncommon strain of disparagement (that could only mask an intense love) such as when Black Arts Movement-era writers critiqued Phillis for not “calling a new nation into being.”
Of course, the existence of theirs and so many other works invoking Phillis’ name tell another story. If Phillis (whose first name I use as part of a Black feminist practice) did not succeed—if she did not call a nation into being, did not survive her early 30s, did not secure a certain legacy—then it is precisely that failure which warrants praise and reinterpretation beyond a shame dynamic by those who are no strangers to similarly mean-spirited (paradoxically loving) critiques.
More than her own failings, perhaps there are times when new nations are just not ready to be called into being.
Kamala Harris clearly received this message. The first woman vice president of the United States from 2021-2025 and Democratic presidential candidate and nominee for just over three months in 2024, she details in her recent memoir, 107 Days, how our nation ultimately disavowed her vision “of our country going forward, one focused on the future” in favor of “one mired in the past.”
Indeed, for some critics to call Phillis, and the contemporary inheritors of her project, unsuccessful founders of nations may be one way of calling them “feminist founders” of something beyond the nation state.
Consider, for example, the easeful endorsement of Harris’ campaign by multiracial British singer and songwriter Charli XCX—who wrote “Kamala is brat.” In other words: “edgy, imperfect, confident, embracing.” A world forged in such an imagination would indeed be “lime green” in its diametric newness to our longstanding political imaginaries.
Although she is known as the first African woman to publish a book of poetry in English (the 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral), Phillis’ biography—her forced Middle Passage journey to Boston, her further enslavement by the Wheatley family, her ascent to poetic celebrity and her subsequent fall into obscurity—looms larger than her poems themselves.
What would it mean to consider Phillis not as a ‘slave’ but as a poet, writer and critic who was ‘enslaved’?
While previous biographies have provided important historical and popular information on the more nuanced conditions of Phillis’ life, there is still room for ongoing unearthing of new aspects of Phillis’ legacy. How might the methods that honor untraditional sources of history—such as memory, or memoir, as Saidiya Hartman and Brent Hayes Edwards write—be used to reveal the emotional truth of her critical imagination?
In conjunction with readers who wish to further study Phillis’s girlhood, her possible Fulani and Muslim-based roots, and her early print reception, I ask: What would it mean to consider Phillis not as a “slave” but as a poet, writer and critic who was “enslaved”? For slavery was not an innate identity on the part of the enslaved, but part of the historical structures that imposed such a status, as Stephanie M. H. Camp describes.
My own ongoing research reveals Phillis as a Black woman of literary prowess, a brat in her own right—“edgy, imperfect, confident, embracing”—who, like her contemporaries today, was subjected to racist imaginaries not her own.
In Phillis’ poem, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” she makes proclamations of “my soul” and “my mind,” and describes spaces of freedom: “Say what is sleep? and dreams how passing strange! / When action ceases, and ideas range / Licentious and unbounded o’er the plains”—anticipating interior dreaming worthy of Zora Neale Hurston’s protagonist Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
While many of Phillis’ poems were occasional poems, often elegies, written to garner support from white Bostonians, I still often wonder, whom was “Thoughts” for—for whom did she write it, if not herself?
Katherine Clay Bassard notes how Phillis’ most well-known poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” was originally titled “Thoughts on Being Brought from Africa to America” in a 1772 proposal, suggesting Phillis’ own thoughts on the matter were once central.
Thomas Jefferson writes infamously in his 14th query of his Notes on the State of Virginia that while Phillis could be conceived by “Religion” it was not enough to make her a poet worthy of “the dignity of criticism.” Jefferson praises instead Ignatius Sancho: “His imagination is wild and extravagant.”
But as is written in Phillis’ 1779 proposal for her second book of poems (which was lost and never published), her readers “may by reading this collection, have a large play for their imaginations, and be ex[c]ited to please and benefit mankind, by some brilliant production of their own pens.”
Thus, Phillis’ work is religious insofar as it is, as Cole Arthur Riley writes, liturgical, “work of/for the people.”
Poetic, imaginative work, was work Phillis wanted to do for herself and on behalf of a community, predicting Harris’ expressed professional desire “to do the work” of a democracy “grounded in the fundamental values of dignity, fairness, and opportunity.”
Alas, many Americans signed up for a world in which, by 2025, more than 300,000 Black women lost their jobs—in a country where employment is often linked to healthcare for oneself and one’s dependents—on a DEI backlash whim and decimation of a federal workforce that was once a secure career for long-committed workers. 300,000. A number large enough for its constituents to comprise its own newfound nation.
Black women found themselves transformed from the blushing brides of 2020’s racial reckoning—and its (short-lived) commitment to understanding the difference between equity and equality—to present-day madwomen imprisoned in the attics of the Americas and their colonial forebears.
As Jean Rhys reminds us in the opening of her 1966 prequel novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a feminist retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s Caribbean adversary, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.”
Indeed, Phillis and her descendants know well the struggles for inclusion. They especially know the struggle to publish a second body of work given the historical and present-day backlash and the overall rejection of Black women’s aspirations (professionally and literarily).
And yet. In a brief conversation last year at Stanford with poet Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio, she professed Phillis’ “On Imagination” to be a favorite poem of hers. Arbus-Scandiffio highlighted a moment in which Phillis did not have to dream of labor (stolen). Of fixing. Cleaning. Feeding. Clothing. Housing. Soothing. But perhaps—at the end of the day—of writing. A letter. A novel. A poem. While everyone else is asleep and the night is blue with possibility.
Phillis’ personification of Imagination is herself a founding feminist, an “imperial queen” beyond mortal contemporaries in power. Attaching ourselves to such, we may “leave the rolling universe behind” and “view” “new worlds.”
Again, scholars like Bassard understand Phillis within a tradition of Black American women whose writing facilitates a conversation across worlds—one with political import.
Phillis’ poem ends on a somber note, speaking to the “trouble” that plagues women’s (poetic) imagination. Nevertheless, the poem awakens a desire to return to the flights Phillis takes upon imagination’s “pinions.”
Indeed, a feminist founding project unfurling ongoingly in 2026 is a literary one. Gothic reimaginations of our classic, pages-worn-from-rereading works abound—their writing and publication undeterred.
Charli XCX recorded the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (which I read in continuity with her previous work: The Brontës are brat), as if to say: If the contemporary moment won’t have us on our own terms, don’t you worry, we’ll ensconce ourselves with our mad foremothers in the attic for a while. Someone in the future will call out to us and when we hear one another, why respond evaluatively when we could respond imaginatively?
When faced with acknowledging histories of women whose very existence were impossible (our own included), we must endeavor to create a world in which such lives (even those already lived) are possible indeed.
“You have to imagine it,” Cornelius Eady intoned in his poem, “Proof,” for Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral inauguration on Jan. 1, 2026. To imagine a world in which Black people are not told to wait when we ask to speak, not muzzled with: “Is it quick?”
The work of imagination is, like Phillis’, our ongoing labor of love:
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
- The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
