Willard, Frances (Elizabeth Caroline)

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WILLARD, Frances (Elizabeth Caroline)

Born 28 September 1839, Churchville, New York; died 17 February 1898, New York, New York

Daughter of Josiah F. and Mary Hill Willard

In 1840 Frances Willard's family moved from New York to Oberlin, Ohio, where both parents attended classes at the then-young college. In 1846 they moved further west, to a homestead on the Wisconsin frontier. Willard had very little formal education before she enrolled in the Wisconsin Female College. After one year she transferred to North Western Female College in Evanston, Illinois, an institution affiliated with her family's church, the Methodist. Her parents joined Willard and her sister in Evanston, which was to be her home for the rest of her life.

Willard graduated in 1859 and then taught in local schools and at female seminaries and colleges in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. She spent two years (1868-70) traveling in Europe, Russia, and the Near East, studying languages and meeting expenses by writing weekly articles for Illinois papers. As Jane Addams was to do in the 1880s, she returned from Europe determined to find independence and a career of service, but Willard meant to serve among the young middle-class women for whom she had already developed a great affection in her years as a student and as a teacher.

She was president of Evanston College for Women from 1871 to 1873, when it was absorbed by Northwestern University. She then became dean of women and professor of English and art. Her career as an educator ended with her resignation in 1874, probably due to conflicts with the university's president, who happened to be Willard's ex-fiancé.

This same summer, Willard was asked to lead the Chicago Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In October, she became secretary of the state organization, and one month later, at the Cleveland convention that founded the national WCTU, she was chosen as corresponding secretary. She was elected national president in 1879 and remained in that position until her death in 1898, leading for over two decades the largest organization of American women in the 19th century.

From 1876 to 1879 she was head of the publications committee, and she used the WCTU journal, Our Union, to promote her own views on the necessity of linking the temperance cause with other political issues, particularly woman suffrage. She lectured widely across the country and became a nationally known figure.

The WCTU advocated not temperance but prohibition. Willard was herself responsible for their slogan, "For God, Home, and Native Land," and regularly rang that theme in pamphlets such as Home Protection Manual (1879). This was to some extent a means to retain the support of a basically middle-class and conservative movement for the aims of the more radical Willard, but it is also a reflection of the fact alcoholism was not only an individual problem, but a threat to women and children who, in the 19th century, had little protection against the financial and physical exploitation of drunken husbands. In the 1890s, she became interested in socialism and argued that poverty is the cause of intemperance. Long before this country's experiment with prohibition, she came to believe that education, not prohibition, is the solution of the problem of alcohol abuse. After her death, however, the WCTU limited its attention to prohibition and abstinence.

As a feminist, Willard was most interested in the development of women's abilities and interests through their active involvement in the WCTU and in the improvement in their status that she hoped the political power of a strong WCTU might accomplish. Describing the temperance movement that began late in 1873 with spontaneous demonstrations of women in several Midwestern states, she writes in History of the Women's National Christian Temperance Union (1876): "A phenomenon no less remarkable, though certainly much less remarked, succeeded the crusade—indeed, is aptly termed its 'sober second thought.' This was the phenomenon of organization. The women who went forth by impulse, sudden, irresistible, divine, to pray in the saloons, became convinced…that theirs would be no easy victory." The image of women as the spiritual saviors (in the home) of a crass society was common in 19th-century America; working with a conservative group, Willard used this image when she discussed the organization of women outside the home.

With Mary A. Livermore, Willard edited A Woman of the Century (1893), the most important 19th-century biographical reference work on American women. In their preface, the editors draw attention to the "vast array of woman's achievements here chronicled, in hundreds of new vocations and avocations." The articles are laudatory, but also concise and factual.

Nineteen Beautiful Years (1864), Willard's first book, is a brief account of the life of her sister, who died in 1861. It is certainly sentimental, but considerably less so than the flowery preface by John Greenleaf Whittier to the second edition (1885). Her sentimentality is particularly evident in What Frances Willard Said (1905), a collection of aphorisms and brief exhortations such as the following appeal for woman suffrage: "by the hours of patient watching over beds where helpless children lay,… I charge you, give mothers power to protect, along life's treacherous high-way, those whom they have so loved." In fact, Willard developed a clear and fairly simple style in which, as in her organizational work, appeals to the ideals of piety, domesticity, and patriotism—although still unpleasant to the modern reader—are connected with a usually well-reasoned argument about the needs of women.

In Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889), Willard's sentimental tendencies are used to good effect in the autobiography of a feminist who did not mean to undervalue the "household arts or household saints…. All that I plead for is freedom for girls as well as boys, in the exercise of their special gifts and preferences of brain and hand." For personal and political reasons, Willard did not choose to dissociate herself from the sentimental or the domestic modes in either her writing or her organizational work.

Other Works:

Hints and Helps in Our Temperance Work (1875). Woman and Temperance; or, The Work and Workers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (1883). How to Win: A Book for Girls (1886). Woman in the Pulpit (1888). The Year's Bright Chain: Quotations for the Writings of Frances E. Willard (1889). A Classic Town: The Story of Evanston by "An Old Timer" (1891). A Great Mother: Sketches of Madam Willard, with M. B. Norton (1894). Do Everything: A Handbook for the World's White Ribboners (circa 1895). A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, with Some Reflections by the Way (1895, reprinted 1991). Occupations for Women, with H. M. Winslow and S. J. White (1897). Writing Out My Heart: Selections from the Journal of Frances E. Willard, 1855-96 (1995).

Bibliography:

Bordin, R. B. A., Frances Willard: A Biography (1986). Dobschuetz, B. S."A Historical Study of the Religious Factors in Frances Willard's Development Before 1874" (thesis, 1992). Earhart, M., Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (1944). Gifford, C., "My Own Methodist Hive": The Nurturing Community of Frances Willard's Young Womanhood (1997). Leeman, R. W., "Do Everything" Reform: The Oratory of Frances E. Willard (1992). Mitchell, N. T., Frances E. Willard: "Yours for Home Protection" (1987). Shelton, C. J., "Frances E. Willard's Southern Tours for Temperance: 1881-1883" (thesis 1986). Slagell, A. R., A Good Woman Speaking Well: The Oratory of Frances E. Willard (dissertation, 1993). Stine, E. C., "Translating the Passive Voice into the Active Voice: An Examination of the Rhetoric of Frances Willard's Evangelical Feminism" (thesis, 1986). Strachey, R., Frances Willard: Her Life and Work (1912).