Frances Willard (suffragist)

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and womens suffragist. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Willard became the national president of Womans Christian Temperance Union in 1879, and remained president until her death in 1898. She developed the slogan Do Everything for the WCTU, encouraging its membership to engage in a broad array of social reforms through lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education. Her vision encompassed raising the age of consent, labor reforms such as the eighthour work day, prison reform, scientific temperance instruction, Christian socialism, and the global expansion of womens rights.

Frances Willard was born in 1839 to Josiah Flint Willard and Mary Thompson Hill Willard in Churchville, near Rochester, New York. She was named after English novelist Frances Burney, the American poet Frances Osgood, and her sister, Elizabeth Caroline, who had died the previous year. She had two siblings, her older brother Oliver and her younger sister Mary. Her father was a farmer, naturalist, and legislator her mother was a schoolteacher. In 1841 the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where, at Oberlin College Josiah Willard studied for the ministry and Mary Hill Willard took classes. They moved to Janesville, Wisconsin in 1846 for Josiah Willards health. In Wisconsin, the family, formerly Congregationalists, became Methodists. Frances Willard and her sister attended Milwaukee Normal Institute, where their mothers sister taught.

Source: Wikipedia