32 Facts About Frances Willard

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist.

Frances Willard's influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted.

Frances Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education.

Frances Willard's vision encompassed prison reform, scientific temperance instruction, Christian socialism, and the global expansion of women's rights.

Frances Willard was named after English novelist Frances Burney, the American poet Frances Osgood, and her sister, Elizabeth Caroline, who had died the previous year.

Frances Willard had two other siblings: her older brother, Oliver, and her younger sister, Mary.

In 1841 the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where, at Oberlin College Josiah Frances Willard studied for the ministry, and Mary Hill Frances Willard took classes.

In 1858, the Frances Willard family moved to Evanston, Illinois, and Josiah Frances Willard became a banker.

Frances Willard worked at the Pittsburgh Female College, and, as preceptress at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in New York.

Frances Willard was appointed president of the newly founded Evanston College for Ladies in 1871.

Frances Willard had previously been engaged to Fowler and had broken off the engagement.

In 1874, Frances Willard participated in the founding convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union where she was elected the first Corresponding Secretary.

Meanwhile, Frances Willard sought to expand WCTU membership in the South, and met Varina Davis, the wife of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was secretary of the local chapter of the Women's Christian Association in Memphis.

Willard had tried and failed to convince Lucy Hayes to assist the temperance cause, but writer Sallie F Chapin, a former Confederate sympathizer who had published a temperance novel, supported Willard and was a friend of the Davises.

When newspapers published a photograph of Frances Willard handing Jefferson Davis a temperance button to give to his wife, Jefferson Davis publicly came out against the referendum and it lost.

Frances Willard argued that it was too easy for men to get away with their crimes without women's suffrage.

Frances Willard claimed that natural and divine laws called for equality in the American household, with the mother and father sharing leadership.

Frances Willard's work took to an international scale in 1883 with the circulation of the Polyglot Petition against the international drug trade.

Frances Willard became the organization's first president in 1888 and continued in that post until 1890.

Frances Willard founded the World WCTU in 1888 and became its president in 1893.

Frances Willard collaborated closely with Lady Isabel Somerset, president of the British Women's Temperance Association, whom she visited several times in the United Kingdom.

In 1898, Frances Willard died quietly in her sleep at the Empire Hotel in New York City after contracting influenza while she was preparing to set sail for England and France.

The Frances Willard House was opened as a museum in 1900 when it became the headquarters for the WCTU.

Frances Willard's statue was designed by Helen Farnsworth Mears and was unveiled in 1905.

Frances Willard is featured on a US postage stamp released on March 28,1940 as part of the Famous Americans series.

Frances Willard appears as one of two main female protagonists in the young adult novel Bicycle Madness by Jane Kurtz.

In 2000, Frances Willard was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Frances Willard Elementary School is a public school in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Frances Willard was a guest of John and Annie Bidwell, the town founders and fellow leaders in the prohibitionist movement.

The rift first surfaced during Wells' speaking tour of Britain in 1893, where Frances Willard was touring and was already a popular reformist speaker.

Frances Willard repeatedly denied Wells' accusations and wrote that "the attitude of the society [WCTU] toward the barbarity of lynching has been more pronounced than that of any other association in the United States," and she maintained that her primary focus was upon empowering and protecting women, including the many African-American members of the WCTU.

Wells believed that Frances Willard condoned segregation by permitting the practice within WCTU's southern chapters.