Frances Willard facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Frances Willard
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Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard
September 28, 1839 |
| Died | February 17, 1898 (aged 58) New York City, US
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| 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 |
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (September 28, 1839 – February 17, 1898) was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth (on Prohibition) and Nineteenth (on women's suffrage) Amendments to the United 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. During her lifetime, Willard succeeded in passing labor reforms including the eight-hour work day. Her vision also encompassed prison reform, scientific temperance instruction, Christian socialism, and the global expansion of women's rights.
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Early life and education
Willard was born in 1839 to Josiah Flint Willard and Mary Thompson Hill Willard in Churchville, near Rochester, New York. She was named after English novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney, the American poet Frances 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. In 1841 the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where, at Oberlin College Josiah Willard studied for the ministry, and Mary Hill Willard took classes. They moved to Janesville, Wisconsin in 1846 for Josiah Willard's health. In Wisconsin, the family, formerly Congregationalists, became Methodists. Frances and her sister Mary attended Milwaukee Normal Institute, where their mother's sister taught.
In 1858, the Willard family moved to Evanston, Illinois, and Josiah Willard became a banker. Frances and Mary attended the North Western Female College (no affiliation with Northwestern University) and their brother Oliver attended the Garrett Biblical Institute.
Teaching career
After graduating from North Western Female College, Willard held various teaching positions throughout the country. She worked at the Pittsburgh Female College, and, as preceptress at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in New York (later Syracuse University). 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 of Northwestern 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. Willard had previously been engaged to Fowler and had broken off the engagement.
Activist (WCTU and suffrage)
After her resignation, Willard focused her energies on a new career: the women's temperance movement. In 1874, Willard participated in the founding convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) where she was elected the first Corresponding Secretary. 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. In 1885 Willard joined with Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, Mary Ellen West, Frances Conant, Mary Crowell Van Benschoten (Willard's first secretary) and 43 others to found the Illinois Woman's Press Association.
In 1879, she sought and successfully obtained presidency of the National WCTU. Once elected, she held the post until her death. 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 met Varina Davis, the wife of former Confederate President Jefferson 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 convince Lucy Hayes (wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes) to assist the temperance cause, but writer Sallie 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 postmaster John 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.
As president of the WCTU, Willard also argued for female suffrage. 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." 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."
Willard's suffrage argument also hinged on her feminist 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."
Willard joined May Wright Sewall at the International Council of Women meeting in Washington, DC, laying the permanent foundation for the National Council of Women of the United States. She became the organization's first president in 1888 and continued in that post until 1890. Willard also founded the World WCTU in 1888 and became its president in 1893. She collaborated closely with Lady Isabel Somerset, president of the British Women's Temperance Association, whom she visited several times in the United Kingdom.
In 1892 she took part in the St. Louis convention during the formation of the People's (or Populist) Party. 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. However, the new party refused to endorse women's suffrage or temperance because it wanted to focus on economic issues.
After 1893, Willard was influenced by the British Fabian Society and became a committed Christian socialist.
Death and legacy
Willard died quietly in her sleep at the Empire Hotel in New York City after contracting influenza while she was preparing to set sail for England and France. She is buried at Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois. She bequeathed her Evanston home to the WCTU. The Frances 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 of National Historic Landmark.
In 1911 the Willard Hall and Willard Guest House in Wakefield Street, Adelaide, South Australia were opened by the South Australian branch of the WCTU.
Memorials and portrayals
The famous painting, American Woman and her Political Peers, commissioned by Henrietta Briggs-Wall for the 1893 Chicago 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.
After her death, Willard was the first woman included among America's greatest leaders in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. Her statue was designed by Helen Farnsworth Mears and was unveiled in 1905.
The Frances Elizabeth Willard relief by Lorado Taft and commissioned by the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1929 is in the Indiana 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."
Frances E. Willard elementary school. Evanston, Il.
The Frances Willard House Museum and Archives is located in Evanston, Illinois.
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.
The Frances E. Willard School in Philadelphia was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
The Frances Willard Schoolhouse in Janesville, Wisconsin was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
Willard Middle School, established in Berkeley, California in 1916, was named in her honor. Willard Park, also in Berkeley and adjacent to the middle school, was dedicated to Frances Willard in 1982.
Frances Willard Elementary School is a public school in Scranton, Pennsylvania.https://willard.scrsd.org/
Frances Willard Avenue in Chico, California is named in her honor. She was a guest of John and Annie Bidwell, the town founders and fellow leaders in the prohibitionist movement. The avenue is adjacent to the Bidwell Mansion.
The Frances E. Willard Temperance Hospital operated under that name from 1929 to 1936 in Chicago. It is now Loretto Hospital.
There's a small memorial at Richardson Beach in Kingston, Ontario, Canada put there by the Kingston Woman's Christian Temperance Union on Sept. 28, 1939.
Willard appears as one of two main female protagonists in the young adult novel Bicycle Madness by Jane Kurtz.
FEW Spirits, a distillery located in Evanston, Illinois, uses Willard's initials as its name.
In 2000, Willard was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
See also
In Spanish: Frances Willard para niños
