Frances Elizabeth Willard

As I mentioned in the last post, Ive been doing research on Frances E. Willard.

For those of you who don't know who she is, here's the rough draft of the introduction for my project:

Frances Elizabeth Willard was an early leader of the International Temperance Movement. Born in Churchville, New York on September 28^th 1839, Ms. Willard moved with her family to Wisconsin at a young age. Ms. Willard received a college education and “at first followed the traditional path of most women toward marriage and had a short, but traumatic, engagement to Charles Henry Fowler, pastor of a Chicago Methodist church".

She ended the relationship and instead became a teacher, first at the Pittsburgh Female College (1861-1864) and later at the Genesse Wesleyan Seminary (1866-1867). After Willard returned to Evanston, Illinois in 1871 to live with her family she was named the Dean of the Women’s Department at Northwestern University. Shortly after, Willard was invited to be the representative of the Chicago Temperance Society to the National Convention. In 1879, Willard was elected President of the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a position she held until her death in 1898.

During her reign of president she expanded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to be the largest national organization of women in the United States in the 19^th century. When the American Union combined with other foreign Temperance movements, Willard became the leader of the first International Women’s Organization. The Temperance Movement was an international backlash to the growing problem of alcoholism in society. Women were the main supporters behind the social and political movement, primarily because of the devastating impact of alcoholism on their lives. In the 19^th century, women were dependent on their husband’s wages for financial support, if a husband succumbed to alcoholism, a woman did not have another means of support. Women had few legal rights and there was no official welfare system, “for them, an alcoholic husband was a family disaster. Alcoholism not only devastated the family’s economic support, it often brought with it … child and spouse abuse”. Society considered the family and home the, “divinely-ordained special province of women”; women viewed themselves as “guardians for the home”, they “believed they had a special mission to bring moral family values into public life”. Willard’s brilliance came from her ability to convince religious, conservative women to join a radical social movement. Socially, it was unacceptable for women during this time period to become involved in politics (after all, women would not receive the right to vote for decades). Luckily, the Temperance Movement began in churches and Willard was able to use the religious base of the movement to lend “respectability and unquestionable social sanction to actions that would have been criticized as blatantly political had they been undertaken in another context”.

PS: I've taken out all the footnotes because of the weird blog formatting thing.