Christopher H. Evans has written a thorough biography of Frances Willard (1839–1898), the second president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). It is the first work of this kind since Ruth Bordin’s, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Willard’s fame during her life, and commemorations in the decades after her death, did not translate into scholarly attention in recent decades and Evans remedies this in a sympathetic, yet critical, work. Aside from the introduction and conclusion, he organizes the book into three sections, “Dreams, 1839–1879”; “Power, 1880–1889”; and “Visions 1890–1898.” The introduction and “Dreams” section provide a thoughtful explanation of her Methodist identity and characterize her as “a Conservative Radical” (6–7), whose beliefs were rooted in the values of Methodism, Anglo-American hegemony, and domesticity. However, Willard pushed for women’s voting rights, demanded respect in the business world, and promoted a myriad of social reforms. She had a nearly “messianic” vision, hoping “to make the United States – and ultimately the world – resemble heaven on earth” (3,6). Nash notes repeatedly that her faith was action oriented, and sometimes ecumenical in that “she was open to investigate an array of religious ideas – including Spiritualism – a trend that later interpreters of Willard’s legacy often omit (41).
Evans covers her childhood relocations, education at North-Western Female College, teaching career, and engagement to Charles Fowler (and termination of the engagement). Despite witnessing challenges with alcohol in her own family, she was not a temperance worker until the Woman’s Crusade of 1873–1874 and soon after joined the WCTU and began to seek leadership roles. Her initial struggle for power was with the first WCTU president, Annie Wittenmyer, who was not a suffrage supporter, being more narrowly focused on temperance. Evans analyzes Willard’s messaging and tactics in winning the presidency over Wittenmyer in 1879, which, coincidentally, emphasized women’s need to enter into the political realm, “a complete breach with the policies of Annie Wittenmyer, who insisted that women who entered politics risked losing their womanly virtue” (115).
The “Do Everything” motto of WCTU under Willard serves as the interpretive thread throughout the book, especially the final two sections. Willard promoted the idea that the WCTU should engage in any activity that even tangentially aided temperance. This led her to support universal women’s suffrage, endorsing specific political parties including the Prohibition Party in the 1880s. This choice led to a split with WCTU leader Ellen Foster, who created the break-away Non-Partisan WCTU. The bundle of social and political reforms, coupled with her Christian commitments, led to what she dubbed “Christian Socialism.”
“Do Everything” also led to other controversies, like the creation of the World’s WCTU, which in turn led to international commitments that sometimes divided the WCTU at home. Her relationship with British temperance activist Lady Isabel Somerset in the 1890s was personally transformative for Willard, but Somerset’s close relationship caused suspicion among some WCTU women for her upper-class roots and elitist airs. Willard’s desire to create a physical presence for the WCTU and to demonstrate women’s business acumen led her to build the WCTU Temple in Chicago, which became a financial and public relation albatross around the neck of the WCTU. Focusing on this expansive nature of Willard’s goal, Evans paints her as an energetic and successful leader, while also explaining how her often well-meaning, but uncompromising choices led to rifts or dissention. Evans points out one of Willard’s major flaws: “she made choices that failed to consider the voices of other women, especially millions of African Americans in the North and the South” (137). He explains her errors as stemming from a desire to court conservative southern white women, who were already nervous about women’s suffrage. But it was also Willard’s racial superiority that is the driver in Evans’ interpretation. Willard’s infamous conflict with journalist Ida B. Wells is given due coverage in part three. In an interview, Willard failed to acknowledge that violence against African Americans in the South was “rooted in white southern racism” (283). Without naming her, Wells critiqued the temperance leader’s comments on race in 1890, and in response, Willard only grew more defensive of her positions and critical of Wells herself.
Evans uses archival materials from several theological repositories and the secondary literature to explain how Willard’s beliefs fit into nineteenth-century theological conversations. The bulk of the sources are, as expected, from the Frances E. Willard Memorial Library and Archives, including Annual Meeting Minutes of the WCTU, pamphlets, Willard’s autobiography, various “tribute biographies” (327), local newspaper coverage of her and WCTU events, and personal letters. Much of the historiographical analysis, discussion of terminology such as “feminism” and its application to this historical era, and even discussions about historical periodization take place in the notes and these deserve a careful read. The conclusion argues that while “Do Everything” policies may have been simplified by subsequent WCTU leaders, the focus on “the causes of women’s political and economic equality continued” (320).
He suggests that the general downplaying of Willard in American history likely stems from the failure of Prohibition itself. He provides another tantalizing strain of thought in that Willard emphasized that “women possessed the ability to bring the values of the home to the nation.” In such language, “one hears distorted echoes of Willard’s vision in Phyllis Schlafly” who worked against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and 1980s (321–322). It is perhaps the political and social right’s echoing of Willard’s commitment to religion and domesticity that makes her a less attractive subject when more radical and seemingly sympathetic figures like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton seem to connect with late-twentieth and twenty-first-century sensibilities. The reasons for this “forgetting” may warrant additional investigation. That said, Evans’s work breathes new life into the story of an important leader in nineteenth-century U.S. history.
