Frances Willard. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ61-790).

Willard, Frances Elizabeth Caroline (28 Sept. 1839-17 Feb. 1898), educator and international temperance leader, was born in Churchville near Rochester, New York, the daughter of Josiah Willard, a businessman and farmer, and Mary Hill, a schoolteacher. When she was two her father sold his substantial farm and business interests and moved his family to Ohio, where both parents studied at Oberlin College. In 1846 the family moved to Wisconsin, where Frances spent the rest of her childhood on their large frontier farm near Janesville. Except for brief stints in rural schools, Willard was tutored by her mother until 1857, when she studied for a year at Milwaukee Female College (later Milwaukee-Downer College) and then at North Western Female College (later part of Northwestern University), receiving a "Laureatte of Science" in 1859. In 1861 she was engaged to Charles Fowler, who became a prominent Methodist clergyman and educator, but they never married. Willard had several serious romantic relationships with men, but her primary emotional ties, although they seem not to have been explicitly homosexual, were to women: her mother and several colleagues and friends, especially Anna Gordon, her secretary and lifelong companion, and Lady Henry Somerset, a British temperance leader.

Willard's first career was in education. In spite of her father's disapproval, she taught in a rural school and an Illinois academy as a very young woman. She continued to teach in the 1860s at several academies and also wrote her first book, a eulogy of a sister who had died of tuberculosis in 1862. A two-year hegira to the British Isles, western Europe, Russia, and the Near East from 1868 to 1870, including some formal study at universities in Paris and Berlin, completed her education and prepared her for larger educational responsibilities. Upon her return, she became president of Evanston College for Ladies, the women's department of Northwestern. She might have continued to pursue an academic career had not Charles Fowler, her former fiancé, become Northwestern's president in 1871. Unable to share authority with Fowler, she resigned in 1873.

The temperance movement provided Willard with a new career. She astutely saw that the women's movement and women's concerns found real focus in the temperance crusade of 1873 and the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) the next year. A moderate temperance adherent like most middle-class women of her time, Willard recognized that temperance was about to become the reform cause most attractive to women moving into public life and that there was room in the movement for creative leadership. Elected secetary of the national WCTU at its organizing meeting in 1874, she transformed that position into the life-force of the organization. A talented speaker and writer, she took to the hustings, wrote the letters and pamphlets, organized the locals, knew more women in the organization than anyone else, and in 1879 was elected president of what was already the largest women's organization in the country, with 27,000 regular members and another 25,000 in junior auxiliaries. For the next twenty years the WCTU grew in both numbers and breadth of concerns. Under Willard's leadership the union endorsed and actively promoted woman suffrage, the kindergarten movement, prison reform, the eight-hour day, model facilities for dependent and handicapped children, federal aid to education, and vocational training. On the state and local level its legislative accomplishments were considerable. Even before women received the vote the WCTU had successfully lobbied for an impressive body of legislation ranging from compulsory scientific temperance education to the raising of the age of consent.

Willard became a highly visible, much respected national leader. By 1890 she was as well known nationally as Eleanor Roosevelt was to be in the 1930s and 1940s. She used her fame not only to promote the temperance cause, but to further her increasingly sweeping ideas on social reform. For example, she allied herself with the Knights of Labor and advocated Christian socialism. She joined the Knights of Labor and supported labor's struggles for the eight-hour day. She played an important role in the Prohibition party in the 1880s, and, although unsuccessful, her attempt to merge the Prohibition party, the new People's party, and Edward Bellamy's Nationalists into a new third party in 1892 remained a goal she never relinquished. Willard devoted much of her time in her last years to the international scene. She organized and served as first president of the World WCTU. These broader duties and her friendship with Lady Henry Somerset kept her in England much of the time after 1892. Ill health plagued Willard in the 1890s, sapping her energies and limiting her activity. Consequently, strong challenges to her leadership developed in the American WCTU, but she was able to maintain control of the women's temperance movement until her death in New York City from pernicious anemia.

As leader of the first mass organization of American women, Frances Willard made an unrivaled contribution toward the movement of women into public life. She combined skillful leadership, broad social vision, and keen intelligence with those virtues so dear to the nineteenth-century middle class, devotion to home and family. She made much of womanliness, justifying attention to reform under the slogan "Home Protection" while simultaneously encouraging women to espouse a set of goals and activities that led them into legislative chambers, union halls, and a host of professions. She raised temperance advocates' awareness of larger issues and the possible political clout of women in a modernizing society. She was able to exploit the nineteenth century's devotion to woman's sphere to secure for women an increasingly powerful public role.

Willard's papers are in the Willard Memorial Library, WCTU Headquarters, Evanston, Ill., and are available on microfilm as part of the Temperance and Prohibition Papers (1977), which also includes WCTU publications, scrapbooks, minutes, and other organizational records. Willard's autobiography is Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889). Also by Willard is Woman and Temperance (1883). A recent biography is Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (1986). See also Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest For Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (1981; repr. 1990); and Mary Earhart Dillon, Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (1944). The most complete obituary is in the Union Signal, 24 Feb. 1898. See also the New York Times, 18 Feb. 1898.

• Frances W. Willard (sic) A Nineteenth Century Leader.
  http://www.history.ohio-state.edu/projects/prohibition/willard/
  From the Ohio State University Department of History. Contains some primary source material.