Friday, April 17, 2009 11:34 AM CDT
USA Yesterdays: Frances Willard: Not just a crusader against liquor
By Hal Malehorn
As a young child, I became aware that my mother was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In my innocence I was not sure of the purpose of that organization, as I naively assumed the word “temperance” had something to do with one’s temper.
Somehow I could not picture my soft-spoken, easy-going mother as ever needing assistance in controlling her rage in therapeutic sessions nowadays referred to as anger management.
Only later did I learn that “temperance” actually meant “moderation.” And I also discovered that for most members of the WCTU (including my mother), the term referred to total abstinence in the use of alcohol, and the restriction of its manufacture and sale.
Eventually it also came to my attention that the president of the WCTU, and the early driving force behind the movement, was Frances Willard.
In reading a biography of Miss Willard, I found that she also was a leading figure in many other social reforms of the late-19th century: votes for women, free kindergartens, the eight-hour workday, Christian socialism and a shorter work week (to name only a few).
Frances Willard was born near Rochester, N.Y., in September 1839. She sprang from New England stock and a father who was active in public life. But while the mother and daughter were close, the father remained aloof.
Frances grew up loving reading and writing. But bereft of her father’s affection, she became a tomboy, Although she received little formal schooling (and that only in her late teens), she was ambitious and soon became the leader of female students enrolled with her in a short-lived educational institution in Evanston, Ill.
She prophetically told her diary, “I am going to earn my own living, fight my own battles, and be a felt force in the world.”
Following a brief stint teaching in downstate Illinois (and another in upstate New York), Willard returned to Evanston to assume the presidency of the college where she had matriculated. When that institution was absorbed into Northwestern University, she stayed on as dean of its Ladies College, where she offered special housing, an honor system, and a curriculum that included “croquet and calculus, tatting and Telemachus, Homer and home.”
After Willard had a falling out with the university’s new president (her ex-fiance), she resigned her post and sought a new opportunity.
That chance was soon in coming, for a vigorous women’s temperance movement in the 1870s was being launched. Willard’s interest in temperance sprang from her father’s past membership in a society for reformed drunkards, and from her brother’s current problems with drink. This was a movement to which Willard would devote her energies for the next 25 years.
But Willard was equally committed to women’s rights. Late in life she said, “I do not recall the time when my inmost spirit did not perceive the injustice done to woman.” Thus, she became a founder of the Woman’s Congress, a group devoted to that cause.
Offered in 1874 the presidency of the Chicago Woman’s Temperance Society, Willard at times found herself working with impoverished, foreign-born residents of the inner city. There, in rescue missions, she developed a talent for preaching.
“This little Gospel meeting, where wicked men have wept and prayed — it thrills me through and through,” she confessed.
Election as secretary of the Illinois Union, and then of the WCTU, soon followed. In the latter capacity, during the summer of 1875 she made 40 speeches and wrote 2,000 letters. She was persuasive on the platform and on the page, and traveled relentlessly on behalf of the organization.
Willard found it most effective to maintain decorum and womanly ways, as was expected in the Victorian age. On the platform, in press and in person she never became strident or confrontational.
By the early 1880s Willard had averaged a meeting a day for 10 years, visited a thousand cities at least once, and helped the WCTU to enlist 200,000 members. Between times she wrote several books, dozens of pamphlets and speeches.
One of her books made a case for ordaining women for church pulpits. Another dealt with temperance. A third was her autobiography. A fourth was a memoir of Evanston. And a fifth touted the pleasures (and benefits) of bicycling!
Along the way, Willard supported prison reform, as well as public water fountains, baths and gymnasiums. She also gladly supported (and addressed) the Knights of Labor, who had earlier promoted equal pay for equal work. There she also spoke out against sweatshops, and advocated unemployment relief and free school lunches.
While some faulted her for her multiplicity of interests (fearing it would detract from her WCTU focus), Willard remained steadfast in attacking every social ill. “Do Everything” was the life motto she had long before adopted.
In fact, in 1888 Willard also organized in Chicago the Woman’s Alliance, representing women engaged in 56 different issues. Not long later she became president of the National Council of Women, involving 40 various organizations devoted to societal reform.
All along Willard maintained strong ties to Methodism, although she rejected literal interpretations of Scripture, and argued for ecumenical cooperation among denominations and faiths. Unhappily, mainline congregations long refused to let her address mixed-sex audiences, or to permit women at conventions.
Willard also attempted to create a political fusion among Populists, Prohibitionists and other third-party adherents. But that effort failed for lack of agreement.
In 1893 Willard was criticized for erecting costly Chicago headquarters, just on the brink of a financial panic. She was also soundly scored for spending so much time in Europe, especially in England, where she was lionized.
Still, as president of the International WCTU, she orchestrated 7 million signatures opposing alcohol.
Back home again in Chicago, she died of pernicious anemia on Feb. 17, 1898. Illinois chose her likeness for Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol.
Willard died before seeing either national prohibition enacted, or women achieving the right to vote. On the other hand, she was spared the outrageous antics of hatchet-wielding prohibitionist Carrie Nation. Now, THERE was a woman who needed help with anger management.
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