Frances Elizabeth Willard

"Celebrated as the most famous woman in America at the time of her death in 1898,Frances E. Willard was a leading nineteenth-century American temperance and women's rights reformer and a powerful orator. President of Evanston College for Ladies (before it merged with Northwestern University) and then professor of rhetoric and aesthetics and the first dean of women at Northwestern, Willard is best known for leading the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), America's largest women's organization." "This definitive collection follows Willard's public reform career, providing primary documents as well as the historical context necessary to clearly demonstrate her skill as a speaker and writer who addressed audiences as diverse as political conventions, national women's organizations, teen girls, state legislators, church groups, and temperance advocates. Including Willard's representative speeches and published writings on everything from temperance and women's rights to the new labor movement and Christian socialism, Let Something Good Be Said is the first volume to collect the messages of one of America's most important social reformers who inspired a generation of women to activism."--BOOK JACKET.

The journal of Frances E. Willard had been hidden away in a cupboard at the national headquarters of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and its importance eluded Willard's biographers. Writing Out My Heart publishes for the first time substantial portions of the forty-nine volumes rediscovered in 1982, opening a window on the remarkable inner life of this great public figure and casting her in a new light. No other female political leader of the period left a private record like this. Written during her teens, twenties, and fifties, the journal documents the creation of Frances Willard's self. At the same time, it often reads like a good novel. It stands as one of the most explicit and painful records in the nineteenth century of one woman's coming to terms with her love for women in a heterosexual world. Other sections reveal what impelled Willard to reform - the nature and depth of the religious dimension of her life - a dimension not yet adequately explored by any biographer. Here we see her growing commitment to the "cause of woman.". The volumes written in her late middle age give insight into the years when, world famous, she was part of the transatlantic network of reform, battling ill health, dealing with controversy in the WCTU, and grieving for her mother, a lifelong figure of emotional support. This finale concludes one of the most fascinating of the journal's themes: the nineteenth-century confrontation with sickness and death.

Written toward the turn of the nineteenth century by Frances Willard, the founder of the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union) and well-known suffragette, A Wheel Within a Wheel offers lively insight into the mind of an independent woman who also reflected the temper of her times. Brave enough to take up bicycle riding when she was fifty-three years old, Willard reported that her bicycling costume "consisted of a skirt and blouse of tweed, with belt, rolling collar, and loose cravat, the skirt three inches from the ground; a round straw hat, and walking-shoes with gaiters. It was a simple, modest suit, to which no person of common sense could take exception."

The founder of the W.C.T.U. writes a history of temperance, which focuses on the work of the Union and on its leaders.