_PARA WPAR@ ` ùTEXT ` ëWillard, Frances Elizabeth Caroline1839╨1898educator and reformerBorn on September 28, 1839, in Churchville, New York, Frances Willard grew up from the age of two in Oberlin, Ohio, and from six in Janesville, Wisconsin Territory. She grew up a sturdy, independent, and strong-willed child of the frontier. She was educated at home, in a district school, and briefly in a private girls╒ school in Janesville. In 1857 she enrolled in 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: in Harlem and then Kankakee, Illinois, in 1860╨1861; at the North Western Female College in 1862; at the Pittsburgh Female College in Pennsylvania in 1863╨1864; at a private girls╒ school in Evanston in 1865╨1866; and at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, in 1866╨1867. During that time she also served as secretary of the American Methodist Ladies Centenary Association in 1865╨1866 and published her first book, Nineteen Beautiful Years, a biography of her deceased sister, in 1864. During 1868╨1870 she made an extended world tour with a friend, and 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. Financial difficulties led to the school╒s being absorbed by Northwestern in 1873, whereupon Frances Willard became dean of women and professor of English and art. She remained there until her constant conflicts of authority with the university╒s president, Charles H. Fowler (to whom she had been engaged in 1861), led her to resign in June 1874. Just at that time the so-called ╥Woman╒s Crusade,╙ a wave of anti-liquor agitation among women in western New York, Ohio, and other localities, was peaking, 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. The latter post placed her in position to become acquainted with local and state WCTU leaders and led also to considerable demand for her services as a lecturer. In 1876 she also became head of the national WCTU╒s publications committee. In that year the national adopted the motto she had composed for the Chicago branch: ╥For God and Home and Native Land.╙ 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 resigned her post with the national WCTU, in large past because of the resistance of President Annie Wittenmyer to her wish to link the goals of liquor prohibition and woman suffrage. She 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, but Willard╒s lobbying efforts inspired similar campaigns in other states. At the national WCTU╒s 1879 convention in Indianapolis Willard was elected president to succeed Wittenmyer; she held the post 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. Her linkage of suffrage and temperance was endorsed by the 1880 national convention. Among the many separate departments she established within the WCTU (eventually numbering 39) to pursue specific goals, the Franchise Department (from 1888 to 1892 under Dr. Anna Howard Shaw) was one of the most active. At Willard╒s invitation, Susan B. Anthony attended the 1881 convention, sparking a walkout by some conservative delegates. Through other departments the WCTU also worked for labor legislation, programs of social health and hygiene, prison reform, international peace, and other liberal ends. 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 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. A convention of delegates from 21 nations met in Boston in 1891 to form the World╒s WCTU, of which Willard was elected president. 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╨1890, and an International Council of Women. She also served as a vice-president of the Universal Peace Union and in 1889 helped organize the General Federation of Women╒s Clubs. 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 National Prohibition party in 1882╨1884, 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. Over the years she wrote frequently for periodicals and for WCTU publications, and her books included Woman and Temperance, 1883, How to Win, 1886, Woman in the Pulpit, 1889, Glimpses of Fifty Years, her autobiography, 1889, A Great Mother, 1894, and A Wheel Within a Wheel; How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, 1895. With Mary A. Livermore she edited A Woman of the Century, 1893. In her later years she spent much time in England, where she came under the influence of the Fabian socialists, a fact that caused more than usual unrest among conservatives in the WCTU. After a year of failing health she died in New York City on February 17, 1898. 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. styl ` 4 ! ¬ $ 5¬ . 5¬ E !I ¡ 5¬ « !I > !I V !I ß 5¬ Γ !I
