Frances Willard | |
|---|---|
 Willard, Frances E.C. 1890-98 | |
| Born | Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839-09-28)September 28, 1839 |
| Died | February 17, 1898(1898-02-17) (aged 58) New York City, US |
| Known for | First dean of women,Northwestern University; long-time president,Woman's Christian Temperance Union; founder,World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union; first president,National Council of Women of the United States |
| Signature | |
 | |
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (September 28, 1839 – February 17, 1898) was anAmerican educator,temperance reformer, andwomen's suffragist. Willard became the national president ofWoman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as theEighteenth (on Prohibition) andNineteenth (on women's suffrage) Amendments to theUnited States Constitution were adopted. Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education.
Willard's accomplishments include raising theage of consent in many states and passing labor reforms, most notably including theeight-hour work day. She also advocated for prison reform, scientific temperance instruction,Christian socialism, and the global expansion of women's rights.[1]
Willard was born in 1839 toJosiah Flint Willard andMary Thompson Hill Willard inChurchville, nearRochester, New York. She was named after English novelistFrances (Fanny) Burney, the American poetFrances Osgood, and her sister, Elizabeth Caroline, who had died the previous year. She had two other siblings: her older brother, Oliver, and her younger sister, Mary. Her father was a farmer, naturalist, and legislator. Her mother was a schoolteacher.[2] In 1841 the family moved toOberlin, Ohio, where, atOberlin College Josiah Willard studied for the ministry, and Mary Hill Willard took classes. They moved toJanesville, Wisconsin in 1846 for Josiah Willard's health. In Wisconsin, the family, formerlyCongregationalists, becameMethodists.[3] Frances and her sister Mary attendedMilwaukee Normal Institute, where their mother's sister taught.
In 1858, the Willard family moved toEvanston, Illinois, and Josiah Willard became a banker. Frances and Mary attended the North Western Female College (no affiliation withNorthwestern University) and their brother Oliver attended theGarrett Biblical Institute.[2][4]
After graduating from North Western Female College, Willard held various teaching positions throughout the country. She worked at the Pittsburgh Female College, and, aspreceptress at theGenesee Wesleyan Seminary in New York (laterSyracuse University).[5] She was appointed president of the newly founded Evanston College for Ladies in 1871. When the Evanston College for Ladies became the Woman's College ofNorthwestern University in 1873, Willard was named the first Dean of Women at the university. However, that position was to be short-lived with her resignation in 1874 after confrontations with the University President,Charles Henry Fowler, over her governance of the Woman's College.[6] Willard had previously been engaged to Fowler and had broken off the engagement.[2]
After her resignation, Willard focused her energies on a new career: the women'stemperance movement. In 1874, Willard participated in the founding convention of theWoman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) where she was elected the first Corresponding Secretary.[4] In 1876, she became head of the WCTU Publications Department, focusing on publishing and building a national audience for the WCTU's weekly newspaper,The Union Signal.[8] In 1885 Willard joined withElizabeth Boynton Harbert,Mary Ellen West,Frances Conant,Mary Crowell Van Benschoten (Willard's first secretary)[9][10] and 43 others to found theIllinois Woman's Press Association.[11]
In 1879, she sought and successfully obtained presidency of the National WCTU. Once elected, she held the post until her death.[12] Her tireless efforts for the temperance cause included a 50-day speaking tour in 1874, an average of 30,000 miles of travel a year, and an average of 400 lectures a year for a 10-year period, mostly with the assistance of her personal secretary,Anna Adams Gordon.
Meanwhile, Willard sought to expand WCTU membership in the South, and metVarina Davis, the wife of former Confederate PresidentJefferson Davis, who was secretary of the local chapter of the Women's Christian Association in Memphis (where one daughter lived). Willard had tried and failed to convinceLucy Hayes (wife of PresidentRutherford B. Hayes) to assist the temperance cause, but writerSallie F. Chapin, a former Confederate sympathizer who had published a temperance novel, supported Willard and was a friend of the Davises. In 1887, Davis invited Willard to her home to discuss the future of her unmarried daughter Winnie Davis, but both Davis women declined to become public supporters, in part because Jefferson Davis opposed legal prohibition. In 1887, Texas held a referendum on temperance, in part because former Confederate postmasterJohn Reagan supported temperance laws. When newspapers published a photograph of Willard handing Jefferson Davis a temperance button to give to his wife, Jefferson Davis publicly came out against the referendum (as contrary to states' rights) and it lost. Although Varina Davis and Willard would continue to correspond over the next decade (as Varina moved to New York after her husband's death, and Willard spent most of her last decade abroad); another temperance referendum would not occur for two decades.[13]
As president of theWCTU, Willard also argued for female suffrage, based on "Home Protection," which she described as "the movement … the object of which is to secure for all women above the age of twenty-one years the ballot as one means for the protection of their homes from the devastation caused by the legalized traffic in strong drink."[14] The "devastation" referred to violent acts against women committed by intoxicated men, which was common both in and outside the home. Willard argued that it was too easy for men to get away with their crimes without women's suffrage.[15] The "Home Protection" argument was used to garner the support of the "average woman," who was told to be suspicious of female suffragists by the patriarchal press, religious authorities, and society as a whole.[16] The desire for home protection gave the average woman a socially appropriate avenue to seek enfranchisement. Willard insisted that women must forgo the notions that they were the "weaker" sex and that they must embrace their natural dependence on men. She encouraged women to join the movement to improve society: "Politics is the place for woman."[17] The goal of the suffrage movement for Willard was to construct an "ideal of womanhood" that allowed women to fulfill their potential as the companions and counselors of men, as opposed to the "incumbrance and toy of man."[15]
Willard's suffrage argument also hinged on herfeminist interpretation of Scripture. She claimed that natural and divine laws called for equality in the American household, with the mother and father sharing leadership. She expanded this notion of the home, arguing that men and women should lead side by side in matters of education, church, and government, just as "God sets male and female side by side throughout his realm of law."[15]
Willard's work took to an international scale in 1883 with the circulation of thePolyglot Petition against the international drug trade. She also joinedMay Wright Sewall at the International Council of Women meeting inWashington, DC, laying the permanent foundation for theNational Council of Women of the United States. She became the organization's first president in 1888 and continued in that post until 1890.[12] Willard also founded the World WCTU in 1888 and became its president in 1893.[18] She collaborated closely withLady Isabel Somerset, president of theBritish Women's Temperance Association, whom she visited several times in the United Kingdom.
In 1892 she took part in theSt. Louis convention during the formation of thePeople's (or Populist) Party.[19] The convention was brought a set of principles that was drafted in Chicago,Illinois, by her and twenty-eight of the United States' leading reformers, whom had assembled at her invitation.[19] However, the new party refused to endorse women's suffrage or temperance because it wanted to focus on economic issues.[19]
After 1893, Willard was influenced by the BritishFabian Society and became a committedChristian socialist.[20]
In 1898, Willard died quietly in her sleep[21] at the Empire Hotel inNew York City after contractinginfluenza while she was preparing to set sail forEngland andFrance. She is buried atRosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.[22]
Frances Willard and her mother Mary Thompson Hill Willard are interred atRosehill Cemetery in Chicago. She bequeathed herEvanston home to the WCTU. TheFrances Willard House was opened as a museum in 1900 when it also became the headquarters for the WCTU. In 1965 it was elevated to the status ofNational Historic Landmark.
The famous painting,American Woman and her Political Peers,[23] commissioned by Henrietta Briggs-Wall for the 1893Chicago Columbian Exposition, features Frances Willard at the center, surrounded by a convict, American Indian, lunatic, and an idiot. The image succinctly portrayed one argument for female enfranchisement: without the right to vote, the educated, respectable woman was equated with the other outcasts of society to whom the franchise was denied.[24]
After her death, Willard was the first woman included among America's greatest leaders inStatuary Hall in theUnited States Capitol.Her statue was designed byHelen Farnsworth Mears and was unveiled in 1905.[25]
Willard is commemorated on a US postage stamp released on March 28, 1940, as part of theFamous Americans series.[26][27]
TheFrances Elizabeth Willard relief byLorado Taft and commissioned by the NationalWoman's Christian Temperance Union in 1929 is in theIndiana Statehouse,Indianapolis, Indiana. The plaque commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Willard's election as president of the WCTU on October 31, 1879: "In honor of one who made the world wider for women and more homelike for humanity Frances Elizabeth Willard Intrepid Pathfinder and beloved leader of the National and World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union."
There is a small memorial at Richardson Beach inKingston, Ontario, Canada put there by the Kingston Woman's Christian Temperance Union on September 28, 1939.
Willard appears as one of two main femaleprotagonists in the young adult novelBicycle Madness by Jane Kurtz.
In 2000, Willard was inducted into theNational Women's Hall of Fame.[28]
Willard Hall inTemperance Temple, Chicago, was named in her honor.[29]
In 1911, theWillard Hall and Willard Guest House in Wakefield Street,Adelaide, South Australia were opened by theSouth Australian branch of the WCTU.[30][31]
Frances E. Willard elementary school.Evanston, Illinois.
Willard Elementary School.River Forest, Illinois.
Frances E. Willard Elementary School,Pasadena, California.
Frances E. Willard Elementary School. Became Willard Junior High School, 1960. Tidewater Drive,Norfolk, Virginia.
The Frances Willard House Museum and Archives is located in Evanston, Illinois.[32]
A dormitory at Northwestern University,Willard Residential College, opened in 1938 as a female dormitory and became the university's first undergraduate co-ed housing in 1970.[33]
TheFrances E. Willard School inPhiladelphia was added to theNational Register of Historic Places in 1987.[34]
TheFrances Willard Schoolhouse in Janesville, Wisconsin, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.[35]
Willard Middle School, established inBerkeley, California, in 1916, was named in her honor.[36] Willard Park, also in Berkeley and adjacent to the middle school, was dedicated to Frances Willard in 1982.[37]
Frances Willard Elementary School is a public school in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Frances Willard Avenue inChico, California, is named in her honor. She was a guest ofJohn andAnnie Bidwell, the town founders and fellow leaders in the prohibitionist movement. The avenue is adjacent to theBidwell Mansion.
The Frances E. Willard Temperance Hospital operated under that name from 1929 to 1936 in Chicago. It is now Loretto Hospital in theAustin neighborhood of Chicago.[38]
F.E.W. Spirits, a distillery located in Evanston, Illinois, uses Willard's initials in its name.[39][40]
Willard Hall was built as a women's dormitory atOklahoma State University inStillwater, Oklahoma in 1938. It housed just over 400 women each year until 1986. After being used for storage for several years, the University invested $9.8 million into renovating the building in 1995. The renovation added a large lecture hall, modern classrooms, labs, and faculty offices. The new purpose of the building was to serve as the home of the College of Education, a role it continues to fill today.
The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day, and I have pondered much why these things were. That so little should be said about them surprises me, for they are everywhere.... In these days when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of 'two hearts in counsel,' both of which are feminine.
– Frances Willard,The Autobiography of an American Woman: Glimpses of Fifty Years, 1889
Contemporary accounts described Willard's friendships and her pattern of long-term domestic assistance from women.[41][42][43] She formed the strongest friendships with co-workers.[44] It is difficult to redefine Willard's 19th-century life in terms of the culture and norms of later centuries, but some scholars describe her inclinations and actions as aligned with same-sex emotional alliance (what historian Judith M. Bennett calls "lesbian-like").[45][46][47][48][49][50]
One of Willard's close relationships with another woman was with her personal secretary,Anna Gordon, whom some scholars refer to as Willard's "lifelong companion." Willard and Gordon lived together for over a decade, and cared for Willard's mother.[51][52]
In the 1890s, Willard came into conflict with African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusaderIda B. Wells. While trying to expose the evils of alcohol, Willard and other temperance reformers often depicted one of the evils as its effect to incite purported black criminality, thus implying that this was one of the serious problems requiring an urgent cure.[53] The rift first surfaced during Wells' speaking tour of Britain in 1893, where Willard was also touring and was already a popular reformist speaker. Wells openly questioned Willard's silence onlynching in the United States and accused Willard of having pandered to the racist myth that white women were in constant danger of rape from drunken black males to avoid endangering WCTU efforts in the South. She recounted a time when Willard had visited the South and blamed the failure of the temperance movement there on the population: "The colored race multiplies like thelocusts of Egypt," and "thegrog shop is its center of power.... The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities."[54]
Willard repeatedly denied Wells' accusations and wrote that "the attitude of the society [WCTU] toward the barbarity of lynching has been more pronounced than that of any other association in the United States,"[55] and she maintained that her primary focus was upon empowering and protecting women, including the many African-American members of the WCTU. While it is true that neither Willard nor the WCTU had ever spoken out directly against lynching, the WCTU actively recruited black women and included them in its membership.
After their acrimonious exchange, Willard explicitly stated her opposition to lynching and successfully urged the WCTU to pass a resolution against lynching. She, however, continued to use the rhetoric that Wells alleged incited lynching.[56] In her pamphletsSouthern Horrors andThe Red Record, Wells linked rhetoric portraying white women as symbols of innocence and purity that black men could not resist, as facilitating lynchings.
Wells also believed that Willard condoned segregation by permitting the practice within WCTU's southern chapters. Under Willard's presidency, the national WCTU maintained a policy of "states rights" which allowed southern charters to be more conservative than their northern counterparts regarding questions of race and the role of women in politics.[57]
Wikisource.
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain.Dillon, Mary Earhart (1979).Notable American Women: 1607–1950. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.ISBN 0674627318.[permanent dead link]
