14. Frances E. Willard, Reformer

Frances E. Willard was born in Churchville, near Rochester, N. Y. When she was two years old her family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, and when she was five, to the beautiful farm in Wisconsin, “Forest Home.” Here she spent her girlhood, working and playing in the fields with her only brother and sister Mary. Her father promised each of the children a library if they would not use coffee or tea until they were twenty-one. They gladly complied with this condition, because each of them had a great thirst for knowledge. Frances wrote stories, plays, poems, and essays at an early age, and at sixteen she won a prize for an essay on “Country Houses.” At eighteen she entered Milwaukee College, but with the removal of the family to Evanston, Ill., she entered Northwestern University, graduating with honors. She first taught a country school, then became teacher in her alma mater, then a teacher in Pittsburg Female Seminary, and later preceptress in the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, at Lima, N. Y. After a short time of travel in Europe studying widely and writing for American magazines, she made so deep an impression in an address delivered at a woman’s missionary meeting, that she was urged to become a lecturer, which she did with great success. In 1871 she was elected president of the woman’s college of her alma mater, and two years later she became dean of the college and professor of esthetics in the Northwestern University. In 1873 she gave up her college work to organize the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of America, and to begin her twelve years’ campaign with lectures before four thousand audiences. She was largely instrumental in securing the enactment of laws in many States of the Union to introduce physiological temperance and the scientific study of stimulants and narcotics into the curriculum of the public schools. For years she was misunderstood; often bitterly criticized, despised, and scorned. But at last she triumphed! Distinguished philanthropists, reformers, and citizens of England assembled in the City Temple of London to give her a reception, and heaped upon her the highest honors, which she modestly received in the name of the women of America. Beginning with nothing, in twenty years, single-handed, this noble woman organized the women of her country into a vast army that extends to village and city, and State and nation, and to foreign lands, with vast equipment of more than sixty departments and methods of activity for public agitation, a system of temperance journals for children and youth for securing instruction in the public schools upon the nature of stimulants. It is said Frances Willard was a woman without a fault. Not only in temperance, but in every good work, did she work for the redemption of humanity. In an article to girls, she wrote: “Keep to your specialty, whether it is raising turnips, or painting screens or battle scenes, studying political economy or domestic receipts. Have a resolute aim. If I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would reply, ‘It is to make the whole world homelike!’”