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==Biography==
==Biography==
She was born to a schoolteacher in [[Churchville, New York]], near [[Rochester, New York]] but spent most of her childhood in [[Janesville, Wisconsin]]. During the family’s stay in Wisconsin, they converted from Congregationalists to Methodists, a Protestant denomination that placed an emphasis on the Christian home unit, centered on the pious wife and mother. <ref>http://www.franceswillardhouse.org/franceslife/</ref> She moved to [[Evanston, Illinois]] when she was 18 to attend North Western Female College. <ref>Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson. 1986. Frances Willard: A biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.</ref>
Tyler is awesome She was born to a schoolteacher in [[Churchville, New York]], near [[Rochester, New York]] but spent most of her childhood in [[Janesville, Wisconsin]]. During the family’s stay in Wisconsin, they converted from Congregationalists to Methodists, a Protestant denomination that placed an emphasis on the Christian home unit, centered on the pious wife and mother. <ref>http://www.franceswillardhouse.org/franceslife/</ref> She moved to [[Evanston, Illinois]] when she was 18 to attend North Western Female College. <ref>Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson. 1986. Frances Willard: A biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.</ref>


In 1871 she became president of Evanston College for Ladies, which merged with [[Northwestern University]] in 1873, at which time she became the first Dean of Women of the Women’s College. However that position was to be short-lived due to her resignation in 1874 after confrontations with the University President, Charles Henry Fowler, over her governance of the Women’s College.<ref>http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/franceswillard/challengeyears.html</ref>
In 1871 she became president of Evanston College for Ladies, which merged with [[Northwestern University]] in 1873, at which time she became the first Dean of Women of the Women’s College. However that position was to be short-lived due to her resignation in 1874 after confrontations with the University President, Charles Henry Fowler, over her governance of the Women’s College.<ref>http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/franceswillard/challengeyears.html</ref>

Revision as of 12:52, 14 October 2009

Frances Willard
Born
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard

(1839-09-28)September 28, 1839
Churchville, New York U.S.
DiedFebruary 17, 1898(1898-02-17) (aged 58)

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (September 28, 1839 – February 17, 1898) was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist.

Biography

Tyler is awesome She was born to a schoolteacher in Churchville, New York, near Rochester, New York but spent most of her childhood in Janesville, Wisconsin. During the family’s stay in Wisconsin, they converted from Congregationalists to Methodists, a Protestant denomination that placed an emphasis on the Christian home unit, centered on the pious wife and mother. [1] She moved to Evanston, Illinois when she was 18 to attend North Western Female College. [2]

In 1871 she became president of Evanston College for Ladies, which merged with Northwestern University in 1873, at which time she became the first Dean of Women of the Women’s College. However that position was to be short-lived due to her resignation in 1874 after confrontations with the University President, Charles Henry Fowler, over her governance of the Women’s College.[3]

After her resignation, Willard focused her energies on a new career, travelling the American East Coast participating in the woman’s temperance movement. Her tireless efforts for women's suffrage and prohibition included a fifty-day speaking tour in 1874, an average of 30,000 miles of travel a year, and an average of four hundred lectures a year for a ten year period, mostly with her longtime companion Anna Adams Gordon. In 1874 she participated in the creation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) where she was elected the first corresponding secretary [4]

Willard was elected president of the United States Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1879, a position which she held for the remainder of her life. She created the Formed Worldwide WCTU in 1883, and was elected its president in 1888 [5]. As president of the WCTU, the crux of Willard’s argument for female suffrage was based on the platform of “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.” [6] 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. [7] The desire for “home protection” gave the average woman a societally appropriate avenue to seek out enfranchisement. Willard insisted that women must forgo the notion that they were the “weaker” sex and that dependence was their nature and must join the movement to improve society, stating “Politics is the place for woman.”[8]

File:Frances Willard.JPG
Willard statue on display in the Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building

The famous portrait, American Woman and her Political Peers,[9] commissioned by Henrietta Briggs-Wall in 1893, featured Frances Willard at the center, surrounded by a convict, American Indian, lunatic, and an idiot. This image succinctly portrayed the 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.

Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (Women Suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution.

She founded the magazine The Union Signal, and was its editor from 1892 through 1898.

She wrote Woman and Temperance, Nineteen Beautiful Years, A Great Mother, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (1889), and the popular bestseller, A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895), as well as large number of magazine articles. Indeed, Willard's promotion of bicycling to her "White Ribbon Army" has been recognized as an overt attempt to domesticate the bicycle and bicycling.[10]

Willard was the first woman represented among the illustrious company of America’s greatest leaders in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. She was national president of Alpha Phi in 1887, and the first dean of women at Northwestern University. In her later years, Willard became a committed socialist. She died of influenza at the Empire Hotel in New York City while preparing to set sail for a visit to England and bequeathed her Evanston, IL home to the WCTU and in 1965 it was elevated to the status of National Landmark, the Frances Willard House.

Public honors

She was publicly honored many times during her life by persons of prominence in government and society in many lands. Carrie Chapman Catt, Pi Beta Phi, said of her, "There has never been a woman leader in this country greater than nor perhaps so great as Frances Willard." She was called the "best loved woman in America".[citation needed] and her close friend, John Greenleaf Whittier, called her "the noblest woman of her age" in 1888.[11] The oldest building of the University of Mary Washington, Frances Willard Hall, is named in her honor. In 1940, she was portrayed on a U.S. postage stamp. A dormitory at Northwestern University, Willard Residential College, was named after her. She was honored in a plaque in School #80 in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Evanston, Illinois home where she lived and worked from 1865 until her death in 1898 has been preserved and made into a museum in honor of her memory. Frances Willard Avenue in Chico, California is named in her honor. There is also an elementary school named in her honor in Evanston, called Frances Willard Elementary school. Frances Willard Middle School [1] and the adjoining park [2] in Berkeley, California are named in her honor, as are Frances E. Willard Middle School in Piedmont, Alabama, Frances Willard Elementary School in Des Moines, Iowa, Frances Willard Elementary Schools in Rock Island, Illinois and neighboring town Moline, Illinois, Frances E. Willard Elementary School in Minneapolis, Minnesota with adjoining city park and Frances E. Willard School in Rosemead, California. Additionally there are Frances Willard Elementary schools located in Eugene, Oregon and in Arkansas City, Kansas. Also, there is a Sorority at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, NE named for Ms. Willard.

Written into South Carolina Law: SECTION 53-3-20. Frances Willard Day. The fourth Friday in October in each year shall be set apart and designated in the public schools as Frances Willard Day and in each public school it shall be the duty of such school to prepare and render a suitable program on the day to the end that the children of the State may be taught the evils of intemperance.

Controversy

Frances Willard expressed views that conflicted with a fellow progressive, the African-American journalist Ida B. Wells. Wells accused Willard of supporting the stereotype of white women needing to be protected against black men, which conflicted with Well's own efforts to dispel that stereotype, as well as accusing Willard of not speaking out against the lynching of black men. Willard repeatedly denied Wells' accusation and maintained that her primary focus was upon empowering and protecting women. (Willard's WCTU actively recruited black women and included them in its membership.) [citation needed]

Publications

  • Woman and temperance, or the work and workers of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Hartford, Conn.: Park Pub. Co., 1883.
  • "Frances E. Willard," in Our famous women: an authorized record of the lives and deeds of distinguished American women of our times... Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington, 1884.
  • Glimpses of fifty years: the autobiography of an American woman. Chicago: Woman's Temperance Publication Association, 1889.
  • How to Win: A Book For Girls NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886. reprinted 1887 & 1888.
  • Nineteen beautiful years, or, sketches of a girl's life. Chicago: Woman's Temperance Publication Association, 1886.
  • Woman's Christian Temperance Union. President. President's Annual Address. 1891
  • Do everything: a handbook for the world's white ribboners. Chicago: Woman's Temperance Pub. Association, [1895?].
  • A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. 1895.
  • Let something good be said : speeches and writings of Frances E. Willard / edited by Carolyn De Swarte Gifford and Amy R. Slagell. 2007

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.franceswillardhouse.org/franceslife/
  2. ^ Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson. 1986. Frances Willard: A biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  3. ^ http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/franceswillard/challengeyears.html
  4. ^ Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson. 1986. Frances Willard: A biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  5. ^ Women Christian Temperance Union.Francis Willard(Evanston, 1996-2008)http://www.wctu.org/frances_willard.html
  6. ^ Willard, Frances Elizabeth. Home protection manual. New York: Published at “The Independent: office, 1879.
  7. ^ Frances Willard, "Speech At Queen's Hall, London," June 9, 1894, in Citizen and Home Guard, July 23, 1894, WCTU series, roll 41, frame 27. Reprinted as "The Average Woman," in Slagell, "Good Woman Speaking Well," 619-625.
  8. ^ Kraditor, Aileen S. 1971. The ideas of the woman suffrage movement, 1890-1920. Garden City,: Anchor Books.
  9. ^ http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/images/116vc.jpg
  10. ^ P.G. Mackintosh and G. Norcliffe (2007) Women and Men and the Bicycle: Gender and the Geography of Cycling in the Late Nineteenth Century, in D. Horton, P. Rosen, and P. Cox (Eds), Cycling in Society, Transport and Society Series (Aldershot, Ashgate), pp. 153-177.
  11. ^ Wagenknecht, Edward. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967: 24.

References

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