Frances Willard

Frances Willard (born Sept. 28, 1839, Churchville, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 18, 1898, New York, N.Y.) was an American educator, reformer, and founder of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1883). An excellent speaker, a successful lobbyist, and an expert in pressure politics, she was a leader of the national Prohibition Party.

Willard grew up from the age of two in Oberlin, Ohio, and from six in Janesville, Wisconsin Territory. Known as Frank to her friends, she grew up a sturdy, independent, and strong-willed child of the frontier. In 1857 she enrolled at the Milwaukee Female College, where she remained for one term. She then transferred to the North Western Female College in Evanston, Illinois, from which she graduated in 1859. She taught school for several years before making an extended world tour with a friend in 1868–70. On her return she settled in Evanston. In 1871 she was named president of the new Evanston College for Ladies, a Methodist institution closely associated with Northwestern University. When the Evanston College for Ladies was absorbed by Northwestern in 1873, Willard became dean of women and professor of English and art. She remained there until her constant conflicts with the university’s president, Charles H. Fowler (to whom she had been engaged in 1861), led her to resign in 1874.

Just at that time the so-called “Woman’s Crusade,” a wave of antiliquor agitation among women, was swelling, and a group of Chicago women invited Willard to become president of their temperance organization. In October 1874 she was elected secretary of the newly organized state temperance society, and in November, at the Cleveland organizing convention, she was chosen corresponding secretary of the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The latter post led to considerable demand for her services as a lecturer. In 1876 she also became head of the national WCTU’s publications committee.

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She resigned as president of the Chicago WCTU in 1877 and worked briefly as director of women’s meetings for the evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Later in the year she left the national WCTU, in large part because of the resistance of President Annie Wittenmyer to her wish to link the issues of liquor prohibition and woman suffrage. Willard lectured widely on suffrage for a year before being elected president of the Illinois WCTU in 1878. Assisted by her secretary and companion, Anna A. Gordon, she secured more than 100,000 signatures on a “Home Protection” petition requesting the Illinois legislature to grant women the vote in matters pertaining to the liquor trade. Presented in March 1879, the petition ultimately died in committee. At the national WCTU’s 1879 convention, Willard succeeded Wittenmyer; she was president of the WCTU for the rest of her life.

Under her leadership the WCTU quickly evolved into a well-organized group able to mount campaigns of public education and political pressure on many fronts. Willard traveled constantly and spoke frequently—in 1883 she spoke in every state of the Union—and was a regular lecturer at the summer Lake Chautauqua meetings in New York. Lecture fees were her principal means of support until the WCTU voted her a salary in 1886.

Work on an international scale began in 1883 with the mission of Mary C. Leavitt and others and the circulation of the “Polyglot Petition” against the international drug trade. In 1888 she joined May Wright Sewall at the International Council of Women meeting in Washington, D.C., and laid the groundwork for a permanent National Council of Women, of which she was first president in 1888–90. She also helped organize the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1889, and in 1891 Willard was elected president of the World WCTU (founded 1883).

Willard’s attempt to induce the WCTU to take an active role in politics ultimately failed. A “Home Protection Party” organized in 1881 effected a short-lived merger with the Prohibition Party in 1882–84, but the rank and file of prohibitionists objected as much to a woman suffrage plank as did WCTU members to party politics. Her plan to strike a coalition with the new People’s Party in 1892 similarly failed.

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Over the years Willard wrote frequently for periodicals and for WCTU publications. Her autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years, was published in 1889. In her later years she spent much time in England, where she came under the influence of the Fabian socialists. In 1905 a statue of her by Helen Farnsworth Mears became one of Illinois’s two submissions to Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.