Frances Willard: A Biography

by Ruth Bordin

Frances Willard (1839-98), national president of the WCTU, headed the first mass organization of American women, and through the work of this group, women were able to move into public life by 1900. Willard inspired this process by her skillful leadership, her broad social vision, and her traditional womanly virtues. Although a political maverick, she won the support of the white middle class because she did not appear to challenge society's accepted ideals.

Genres: Biography

310 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1986

Reviews

[Lindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finding a small pin with Willard's profile among my deceased grandmother's jewelry, I was intrigued to learn more about this forgotten figure in the American temperance and suffrage movements. In her lifetime, Willard was as well known to the general public as Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s and 40s, author Ruth Bordin emphasizes. Willard's affiliation with the Women's Christian Temperance Union (responsible for the passage of prohibition legislation in 1920) and the dismissal of prohibition as a serious political cause inevitably led to Willard's obscurity, while other figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all universally associated with women's suffrage, remain well known. What is forgotten is that alcohol abuse was a much more serious and widespread problem during Willard's lifetime that it ever has been since Prohibition's repeal in 1933 (one only has to look at the documentary photography of Jacob Riis to understand why a working man might want a few pints before going home to his squalid one-room tenement and family).

Nevertheless, Willard lived an exemplary life of remarkable achievement--she was the first dean of women at Northwestern, the president of the WCTU, and a gifted speaker and writer who spent a short time working for Dwight L. Moody's evangelical revivals. She later left Moody's group due to the latter's sexist practices during altar calls (in mixed meetings, Moody only allowed men to come forward; women were allowed to do so only in separate meetings).

Willard defied convention and never married, despite a short engagement to the future president of Northwestern, Charles Fuller (with whom she later locked horns as the dean of women).She advised young women to "earn their own livings, be independent, and marry men who shared their interests," highlighting Willard's feminist leanings, although she claimed temperance as a movement of "home protection" and suffrage as the means for women to protect themselves and their families from the lure of the rum shop.

[Clarence Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I wasn't being realistic when I expected Willard's story to leap from the pages like a gothic novel. I mean, shouldn't the life of the woman who was the face of the Women's Christian Temperance Union AND the inspiration for a liquor company in Evanston AND one of the first female big shots at Northwestern generate some...animation? While it is my tendency to treat every book like a finite love affair, sadly, I couldn't wait for this book to end.

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Willard one of the best examples of early feminist that made substantive social changes while working within the mainstream.