FRANCES E. WILLARD.
THE ORGANIZER AND HEAD OF THE W. C. T. U.
ITH the latter years of this century a new power has made itself felt in the world—the power of organized womanhood. Fifty years ago such a body as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was not only unknown, but impossible; and fifty years ago the woman who has done more than any other to bring it into being was a bright, healthy child of five years, living at Oberlin, Ohio, whither her father and mother had moved from Monroe County, New York, where she was born in September, 1839. In 1846 there was another move westward, this time to Forest Home, near Janesville, Wisconsin. Here Miss Willard spent twelve years, in which she grew from a child to a woman. She had wise parents, who gave free rein to the romping, freedom-loving girl, and let her grow up “near to nature’s heart.” She could ride a horse or fight a prairie fire “just as well as a man.”
After twelve years of life on Wisconsin prairies, the Willard family moved to Evanston, on the shore of Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago. Here Miss Willard began her work as a teacher, which she pursued in different institutions until 1870, when she was chosen president of Evanston College for Ladies. This place she filled until 1874, when she finally gave up teaching to enter upon a new and still larger work.
In 1873 occurred in Ohio the memorable “Women’s Crusade” against the rum shops. Bands of devoted women besieged the saloons for days and weeks together, entreating the saloon-keepers to cease selling liquor, praying and singing hymns incessantly in bar-rooms or on the sidewalks, until the men who kept them agreed to close them up, and in many cases emptied barrels of liquor into the gutters. This movement at once arrested Miss Willard’s attention. She saw in it the germ of a mighty power for good. She resigned her position as president of the college at Evanston, and threw all her energies into the anti-liquor movement. With her customary thoroughness she entered upon a systematic study of the subject of intemperance and the sale of liquor, and of the different measures which had been undertaken to abate this mighty evil. She sought the counsel of Neal Dow and other leaders in the temperance cause. She joined in the crusade against liquor-selling in Pittsburgh, kneeling in prayer on the sawdust-covered floors of the saloons, and leading the host in singing “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “Rock of Ages,” in strains which awed and melted the hearts of the multitude thronging the streets. The result of her work was a determination to combine in one mighty organization the many separate bands of women temperance workers which had sprung up over the country; and this was achieved in the autumn of 1874, in the organization at Cleveland of that wonderful body, the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The resolution which was adopted at that meeting, written by Miss Willard herself, beautifully expresses the spirit in which they entered upon the work. It read as follows:—
“Resolved, That, recognizing that our cause is and will be contested by mighty, determined, and relentless forces, we will, trusting in Him who is the Prince of Peace, meet argument with argument, misjudgment with patience, denunciation with kindness, and all our difficulties and dangers with prayer.”
From that time Miss Willard’s life is the history of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Like the “handful of corn in the tops of the mountains,” all over this and in other lands it has taken root and grown until the fruit does indeed “shake like Lebanon.” In almost every corner of the United States is a subordinate organization of some sort, a local union, a children’s band, a young woman’s circle, or perhaps all of these. It has built the great “Temperance Temple,” one of the largest of the immense business buildings in Chicago. It has organized a large publishing business, from whose busy presses temperance literature is constantly being circulated in all parts of the country. It has by its political power made and unmade governors, senators, and representatives; and it has done much to hasten the time when women shall take an equal share in the government of church and state. In all this work the head and guiding spirit has been Frances E. Willard.
Overwork has of late somewhat impaired her health, and made travel and rest abroad necessary. But in whatever corner of the world she may dwell, there is always a warm corner kept for her in the many thousand hearts and homes that have been cheered and brightened by her work “for God and home and native land.”
Miss Willard’s friend and co-worker, Hannah Whitall Smith, says of her: “Miss Willard has been to me the embodiment of all that is lovely and good and womanly and strong and noble and tender in human nature. She has done more to enlarge our sympathies, widen our outlook, and develop our gifts, than any man or any other woman of our time.”
HOME PROTECTION.
(FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN PHILADELPHIA, 1876.)
ONGER ago than I shall tell, my father returned one night to the far-off Wisconsin home where I was reared, and sitting by my mother’s chair, with a child’s attentive ear I listened to their words. He told us of the news that day had brought about Neal Dow, and the great fight for Prohibition down in Maine, and then he said: “I wonder if poor, rum-cursed Wisconsin will ever get a law like that?” And mother rocked awhile in silence, in the dear old chair I love, and then she gently said: “Yes, Josiah, there’ll be such a law all over the land some day, when women vote.”
My father had never heard her say as much before. He was a great conservative; so he looked tremendously astonished, and replied, in his keen, sarcastic voice: “And pray, how will you arrange it so that women shall vote?” Mother’s chair went to and fro a little faster for a minute, and then, looking not into his face, but into the flickering flames of the grate, she slowly answered: “Well, I say to you, as the Apostle Paul said to his jailor: ‘You have put us into prison, we being Romans, and you must come and take us out.’”
That was a seed-thought in a girl’s brain and heart. Years passed on, in which nothing more was said upon this dangerous theme. My brother grew to manhood, and soon after he was twenty-one years old he went with father to vote. Standing by the window, a girl of sixteen years, a girl of simple, homely fancies, not at all strong-minded, and altogether ignorant of the world, I looked out as they drove away, my father and brother, and as I looked I felt a strange ache in my heart, and tears sprang to my eyes. Turning to my sister Mary, who stood beside me, I saw that the dear little innocent seemed wonderfully sober, too. I said, “Don’t you wish that we could go with them when we are old enough? Don’t we love our country just as well as they do?” and her little frightened voice piped out: “Yes, of course we ought. Don’t I know that; but you mustn’t tell a soul—not mother, even; we should be called strong-minded.”
In all the years since then, I have kept those things, and many others like them, and pondered them in my heart; but two years of struggle in this temperance reform have shown me, as they have ten thousand other women, so clearly and so impressively, my duty, that I have passed the Rubicon of Silence, and am ready for any battle that shall be involved in this honest declaration of the faith that is within me. “Fight behind masked batteries a little longer,” whisper good friends and true. So I have been fighting hitherto; but it is a style of warfare altogether foreign to my temperament and mode of life. Reared on the prairies, I seemed pre-determined to join the [♦]cavalry force in this great spiritual war, and I must tilt a free lance henceforth on the splendid battlefield of this reform; where the earth shall soon be shaken by the onset of contending hosts, where legions of valiant soldiers are deploying; where to the grand encounter marches to-day a great army, gentle of mien and mild of utterance, but with hearts for any fate; where there are trumpets and bugles calling strong souls onward to a victory which Heaven might envy, and
“Where, behind the dim Unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.”
[♦] “calvary” replaced with “cavalry”
I thought that women ought to have the ballot as I paid the hard-earned taxes upon my mother’s cottage home—but I never said as much—somehow the motive did not command my heart. For my own sake, I had not courage, but I have for thy sake, dear native land, for thy necessity is as much greater than mine as thy transcendant hope is greater than the personal interest of thy humble child. For love of you, heart-broken wives, whose tremulous lips have blessed me; for love of you, sweet mothers, who in the cradle’s shadow kneel this night, beside your infant sons; and you, sorrowful little children, who listen at this hour, with faces strangely old, for him whose footsteps frighten you; for love of you, have I thus spoken.
Ah, it is women who have given the costliest hostages to fortune. Out into the battle of life they have sent their best beloved, with fearful odds against them, with snares that men have legalized and set for them on every hand. Beyond the arms that held them long, their boys have gone forever. Oh! by the danger they have dared; by the hours of patient watching over beds where helpless children lay; by the incense of ten thousand prayers wafted from their gentle lips to Heaven, I charge you give them power to protect, along life’s treacherous highway, those whom they have so loved. Let it no longer be that they must sit back among the shadows, hopelessly mourning over their strong staff broken, and their beautiful rod; but when the sons they love shall go forth to life’s battle, still let their mothers walk beside them, sweet and serious, and clad in the garments of power.
