Willard, Frances

WILLARD, FRANCES (1839–1898). Widely known as “Woman of the Century,” and a strategist and public spokeswoman for the most powerful women’s organization in the world, Frances Willard has been less remembered as a vocal Fabian socialist.

Born outside Rochester, New York, to a cabinet-maker and farmer, she was descended from a long line of Yankee rural folk. Her parents had both enrolled at liberal Oberlin College before moving west to care more properly for young Frances, who had contracted tuberculosis. Reared in the Wisconsin Territory, Willard grew up a tomboy and daughter of a legislator, yearning for more education. She graduated from the North Western Female College in Evanston, Illinois, in 1859, and retained Evanston as her principal home. She taught and administered at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, became president of the new Evanston College for Ladies, then dean of women and professor of English and art at Northwestern University, which absorbed the college. After friction with Northwestern’s president (her former fiance), she resigned her position in 1874, personally adrift. At this point, the new statewide women’s temperance movement of Illinois asked her to become their chairperson, and she readily assented, becoming the corresponding secretary to the newly founded Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

She immediately indicated that temperance, per se, was but one of her broader reform interests, in which she hoped the WCTU would become involved. Resigning from her national position, she threw herself into woman suffrage work, and undertook a mass-petition temperance campaign in Illinois, which became the national model for such efforts. By 1879, the WCTU had named her its national president, a position she retained the rest of her life. From this power base, she became an important contemporary personality and an outstanding presence on the lecture circuit. In 1889 she published an enormously popular autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years. As her strategy pamphlet, Do Everything (1895), indicated, she urged engagement in every reform arena relevant to women’s lives, frequently directing that engagement personally.

By this means, she became involved in radical causes. In the late 1880s, drawn to Knights of Labor leader Terrence Powderly and to the cause of labor more generally, she avowed warm support of the Knights. In 1892, at the People’s Party’s famed Saint Louis convention, Willard sought unsuccessfully to combine with Powderly and others to effect a coalition of reformers and radicals in a single antimonopoly movement. (Temperance, along with other issues, proved too divisive.) She had already converted to socialistic ideas through the reading of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward.

Bellamy had shown, Willard insisted, how the transformation of society could be conducted, and the cooperative order instituted peacefully, through women’s decisive participation. Within the WCTU, she frequently evoked Bellamy’s views as the answer to the “labor question,” and urged members to join Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs, arguing that “in each Christian there exists a socialist; and in every socialist a Christian.”

Troubled by her defeat at Saint Louis and the collapse of Populism into the “silver question” in 1896, Willard spent little of her remaining life in the United States. In England, sojourning with a wealthy patron, she joined the Fabian Society. Returning for the WCTU national conventions of 1893 and 1894, she urged Fabian principles of socialism upon the WCTU membership. Over this and other issues, dissidents rose up in the WCTU to challenge her, but members loyally returned her to the presidency. In these last years, she frequently stated that, had she her life to live over, she would have devoted it to socialism rather than temperance. Her health collapsed, and she died in New York in 1898. Her body was moved to Chicago, where a crowd of twenty thousand filed past her casket.

Her influence, however had only begun to affect American socialist women. She had demonstrated by her life and commitment that women had a central role to play in the coming of socialism, and that to do so they had to organize among themselves according to the prevailing moral principles. Socialist women in the rural Midwest, Plains states, and Southwest regarded Willard as their particular avatar. Orators regularly addressed the “woman question” in Willardian tones, asserting that only socialism could bring woman into full equality and meanwhile protect the home. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of erstwhile WCTU members and a handful of leading women agitators, most notably Lena Morrow Lewis and Iowa temperance leader Marion Howard Dunham, moved over from WCTU to socialist agitation. In a broader sense, the format of women’s meetings owed much to Willard’s influence: the parlor setting, the stress upon women’s self-advancement through gender-conscious education, the sentimental evocation of motherhood in the rhetoric.

For their part, socialist publications tirelessly reiterated that (as one headline went) FRANCES WILLARD PREACHED THE “DEBS DOCTRINE.” Her photo appeared regularly on magazine covers, especially of the Socialist Woman, and in combined photos of socialist women leaders used frequently by local newspapers. Josephine Conger-Kaneko, editor of the Socialist Woman/Progressive Woman, urged Willard’s example on her readership with notable frequency. Debs himself, emotionally close to Willard’s view of home and family, deemed her a socialist prophet until the end of his life. Thereafter, her memory expunged from the Left pantheon by Communists and claimed for conservatives by the WCTU, Frances Willard disappeared as a radical idol. She was, however, destined to be rediscovered only a half-century later by feminist historians attuned to her devotion to woman suffrage and her intense advocacy of female friendship and companionship.

Bordin, Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

Bordin, Ruth. Frances Willard: A Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Frances E. Willard Papers, 1871-1898, Archival and Manuscript Collections. Northwestern University. Evanston, Illinois. https://findingaids.library.northwestern.edu/repositories/6/resources/1107

Gifford, Carolyn De Swarte, and Amy R. Slagell, eds. Let Something Good Be Said: Speeches and Writings of Frances E. Willard. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Gordon, Anna. The Beautiful Life of Frances Willard. Chicago: Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1898.