Frances Willard (September 28, 1839 – February 17, 1898)

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was once considered to be the most influential and famous woman in America. Frances Willard was born on September 28, 1839, in Churchvill, New York to Josiah and Mary Willard. Both of her parents were educators, and soon after her birth, they moved to Oberlin, Ohio, so Josiah could study for the ministry. Mary also attended Oberlin College, which was very rare for a woman, especially one married with children. The family later moved to a farm near Janesville, Wisconsin, due to Josiah’s ailing health. Frances, or as she preferred to be called, “Frank,” invested her childhood with her older brother Oliver and younger sister Mary. At an age when most girls were learning fairy tales, she was reading The Slave’s Friend, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, which was an abolitionist paper that helped shaped her humanitarian nature.

In 1857, Frances attended Milwaukee Female College, and the following year she began studying at Northwestern College for Females. She graduated in 1859 with high honors as class valedictorian. In 1860, she began teaching, and by age twenty-four she was teaching science at her alma mater. When her sister died, Frances wrote a book about Mary entitled Nineteen Beautiful Years, which was published in 1864. It was the first of several books she would come to publish in her lifetime.

Frances continued to teach at various colleges until 1868, when she and her friend Kate Jackson took a couple of years off to tour Europe, sponsored by the generosity of Kate’s wealthy father. Upon returning from Europe, Frances was appointed founding president of the newly established Evanston College for Ladies, built on land donated by Northwestern University. Here she introduced an innovative approach to eduation, whereby women could choose to stay within the structure of ECL or branch out into Northwestern University’s traditionally male-only studies. It is rumored that Frances, who never married, was once engaged to Charles Fowler, the appointed president of Northwestern in 1870. The alleged former lovers immediately clashed over how much authority Nortwestern should have over the College for Ladies. In the end, she lost, and the Evanston College for Ladies was integrated, becoming the Women’s College of Northwestern University. This annexation occurred in 1873, and she was made its first dean, while still serving as professor of aesthetics and natural science.

No longer able to govern her school the way she wanted, Frances resigned after one year as dean, and began her true legacy. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was in its infancy, and Frances, whose brother and nephews has suffered from alcoholism, knew firsthand the devastation caused by alcohol. She helped organize the Temperance Union’s Chicago chapter, and became its first secretary. In 1879, she became the second president of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a position she held until her death nineteen years later.

As president, she vastly broadened the organization’s scope to include advancing women’s right to vote, employing harsher penalties for rape (which often was assigned lesser penalties than cow theft), raising the age of sexual consent (which in twenty states was age ten, and in one state was only seven), making men who purchased sex as guilty as the prostitutes they solicited, and promoting labor’s right to organize. While other suffragist were promoting women as equal to men, Frances focused on how feminine ideals differed from masculine ideals, and how considering the political principles which women aspired to would lend balance to the issues society faced. Her own feminine demeanor and promotion of Christian principles gained her wide acceptance from the general public.

Her tireless work included traveling an average of 30,000 miles annually to give an about 400 lectures per year, which she did for ten years. While on the road, she hired local secretaries to assist her, sometimes keeping up to six secretaries simultaneously busy with her massive correspondence. She remained the national president of the Temperance Union, and in 1887 became the national president of Alpha Phi as well. From 1888 to 1890, she was the president of the National Council for Women, and was appointed president of the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1891.

Frances was founder and editor of the magazine The Union Signal from 1892 until her death. She passed away on February 17, 1898 from influenza, which developed during a visit to New York City. Upon her death, flags were lowered to half-mast, and the train transporting her remains from New York to Chicago stopped for services along the way, like a presidential funeral train.

In Chicago, her casket was visited by 30,000 people in one day. She is buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois. The Frances Willard House and Historical Museum in Evanston, Illinois is dedicated to her and is a national historic landmark. In the Washington D.C. Statuary Hall, a statue of Frances Willard stands, representing Illinois’s most treasured citizen. She is the only woman represented, out of fifty. The dedication statement reads as follows:
“Illinois, therefore, presents this statue, not only as a tribute to her whom it represents – one of the foremost women of America – but as a tribute to woman and her mighty influence upon our national life; to woman in her home; to woman in all the occupations and professions of life; to woman in all her charity and philanthropy, wherever she is toiling for the good of humanity; to woman everywhere, who ever stood for `God for home, for native land.’”

The impact Frances Willard had on women and society, for our country and beyond, is undeniably immeasurable. Evergreen Washelli is proud to honor her legacy by dedicating the Frances Willard Cove in the Washelli Columbarium.

We invite you to read more about the lives of the women in our care, and share your stories about women who made history.