About the Book
Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. Emphasizing what she called "Do Everything" reform, Willard became a central figure
in international movements in support of prohibition, women's suffrage, and Christian socialism. A devout Methodist, Willard helped to shape predominant religious currents of the late nineteenth century
and was an important figure in the rise of the social gospel movement in American Protestantism.The first biography of Frances Willard to be published in over thirty-five years, Do Everything explores Willard's life, her contributions as a reformer, and her broader legacy as a women's rights activist in the United States. In addition to chronicling Willard's life, historian Christopher H. Evans examines how Willard crafted a distinctive culture of women's
leadership, emphasizing the importance of religious faith for understanding Willard's successes as a social reformer. Despite her enormous fame during her lifetime, Evans investigates the reasons why Willard's legacy
has been eclipsed by subsequent generations of feminist reformers and assesses her importance for our time.
Table of Contents:
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Illustrations
Introduction
Part I Dreams, 1839-1879
Chapter One: "A Romping Girl"
Chapter Two: "What a Queer Girl Frank Willard Is!"
Chapter Three: "I Shall be of Use to the World"
Chapter Four: "Tell Every Body to Be Good"
Chapter Five: "Moral Horticulture"
Chapter Six: "Wanderer on the Face of the Earth"
Chapter Seven: "Home Protection"
Chapter Eight: "How to Win"
Part II Power, 1880-1889
Chapter Nine: "Agitate, Educate, Organize"
Chapter Ten: "Such Chivalry toward Women"
Chapter Eleven: "Gospel Politics"
Chapter Twelve: White Shield Women
Chapter Thirteen: New Testament Ethics
Chapter Fourteen: "This is My Busy Day"
Chapter Fifteen: "I Should have loved ... to be a Gospel Preacher"
Chapter Sixteen: "Dawn of Woman's Day"
Chapter Seventeen: "Gospel Socialism"
Part III Visions, 1890-1898
Chapter Eighteen: "Our House Beautiful"
Chapter Nineteen: "Dearest Cossie"
Chapter Twenty: "Queen Frances"
Chapter Twenty-One: "My Cares are too Heavy"
Chapter Twenty-Two: "You Know ... of the Difficulty in which I have been Placed by this Unjust Controversy"
Chapter Twenty-Three: "What Ails Miss Willard?"
Chapter Twenty-Four: "How Beautiful it is to be with God"
Conclusion: "Had Vision ... in which a Woman Becomes President of the United States"
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Christopher H. Evans is Professor of the History of Christianity and Methodist Studies at Boston University School of Theology. One of the leading scholars of the social gospel movement, he has written numerous books and articles on American religion and the history of Christianity. His books include The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch, which received an Award of Merit from Christianity Today in 2005.
Review :
With prodigious research and compelling prose, Christopher Evans brings to life one of the most consequential activists in the final decades of the nineteenth century. During this age of the New Woman and the Social Gospel, Frances Willard combined her temperance work with suffrage to unleash a formidable social reform movement. This superb and comprehensive biography should restore Willard to her rightful place as one of the most influential religious leaders in American history.
Chris Evans's richly detailed, page-turning account of the 'do everything' woman corrects a huge historical oversight. Smart, courageous, and charismatic, Willard was one of the most celebrated Americans of her time-and yet, surprisingly, she is barely known today. Evans ably demonstrates the importance of this remarkable religious thinker and canny organizer, who led a generation of women out of kitchens and parlors into forceful public activism.
During an era in which women were barred from formal leadership in church and state alike, Frances Willard was a giant in the American public square. In this definitive biography, Evans reveals how Willard became one of the Gilded Age's most formidable reformers, defying and transforming expectations of the good Christian woman along the way. Underscoring both the breathtaking ambition and profound limitations of Willard's moral vision, Evans recovers a too-often forgotten past
Evans emphasizes Willard's turn to larger social reform issues such as the labor movement and Christian socialism. She wanted the WCTU to "do everything" and left behind those committed solely to prohibition. She also espoused the white Anglo-Saxon superiority that sustained racism and fostered hostility to immigrants. In time, she grew suspicious of those challenging her authority. When she developed a close and perhaps intimate friendship with the English prohibition advocate Isobel Somerset and spent more time in England, her base of support dwindled. She could not "do everything." Of interest to students and scholars of American religion, women's history, and social reform, this is now the standard biography of Willard.
With Do Everything, Christopher H. Evans has provided scholars and the general public alike with an engaging, highly readable, and often quite moving portrait of arguably the most famous American woman of the Victorian age.
Do Everything is a masterful explication of a single life which, even long after ceasing to be a household name, continues to cast a massive shadow.
One of the strengths of the book is the author's sensitivity to regional differences. Passionately committed to building a strong national constituency around what she referred to as a "trinity" of social causes (prohibition, women's rights and suffrage, and workers' rights) Willard faced serious hurdles in the South and Northeast. Always strongest in the Midwest and the West, the WCTU's attempt to link the fate of temperance with women's suffrage labor rights was resisted by both Democratic and Republican partisans.
The biography demonstrates that rights and privileges enjoyed in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries were not easily won and should not be taken for granted. At the same time, in hindsight, later generations should benefit from better understanding of cultural blind spots, such as deeply embedded theories of race, class, and gender; and philosophies of history that rise and fall in popularity from generation to generation.
Do Everything provides pivotal intersections with a range of nineteenth-century issues to such an extent that the book could be read not only as Willard's biography but also as a deep dive into the era through its most prominent issues, such as prohibition, racism, sexism, human sexuality, women's roles in home, church, and society, and women's suffrage. This is not surprising given that via the WCTU's 'Do Everything' policy under Willard's nearly twenty-year presidency (1879-98), the organization provided women with their own institution for societal and ecclesial reform.
In Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard, Christopher H. Evans offers a stirring portrait of the American activist whose leadership elevated the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) into a national juggernaut that not only advanced the cause of a constitutional prohibition amendment, but also pushed for rights for women and workers.
C. H. Evans, professor of the History of Christianity and of Methodist studies at Boston university, is one of the main researchers of the Social Gospel Movement - similar to social Christianism but with different à cultural context. He provides a thorough and well documented study of the life, work and world of one of the best-known but little-studied women of the XIXth century, Frances Willard (1837-1898), Methodist, long-time head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Evans's work breathes new life into the story of an important leader in nineteenthcentury U.S. history.
