Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard by Christopher H. Evans (review)

Reviewed by: Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard by Christopher H. Evans William Kostlevy Christopher H. Evans, Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 408 pp. 43. 99 (hardcover). The iconoclastic historian E. P. Thompson dedicated his life to rescuing the lives of those ignored by the "enormous condescension of posterity. " But as the life of Frances Willard (1839–1898) demonstrates, posterity can be unkind to the famous as well as the obscure. As one of the most lionized and admired public figures of the late nineteenth century, Willard's reputation has suffered along with the reputation of the movement she is most often identified with—the global movement to restrict the consumption of alcoholic beverages. But as Christopher Evans's compelling, but not uncritical, biography argues, Willard deserves a very different fate. She was, in fact, a End Page 234 central actor in the campaign for women's rights and the labor movement, and supported both socialism and populism. Building on the important work of Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, editor of selections from Willard's journals, Evans faced the unenviable task of sifting through and making sense of one of the most thoroughly documented lives of the nineteenth century. As a principal figure in an international movement, Willard left an immense amount of primary documentation. She wrote for the widely circulated publications of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), her writings appeared in a wide range of popular magazines, and she wrote a descriptive and Midwestern-focused 700-page autobiography. Evans, the biographer of Willard's now more respected contemporary Walter Rauschenbusch, makes the judicious decision to approach Willard's life chronologically. Drawing on his previous work as an historian of the Social Gospel movement, Evans correctly identifies Willard with that emerging movement and not, as some recent historians such as Lisa McGirr, with proto-Fundamentalism. "For Willard, " Evans writes, "creating an alcohol-free nation was not an end in itself. Rather, the working to pass prohibition could compel women to examine and act upon a range of other social issues. " (6) As Evans demonstrates, Willard is not only a figure of national and international importance, she is a quintessential Midwesterner. Like so many other Midwestern reformers of her era, including her friend and admirer Richard T. Ely, Willard was born in upstate New York. Her parents had been active participants in the religious revivals that swept through the "burned-over district. " Fittingly, as a small child she accompanied her family to the reform mecca of Oberlin, Ohio where her father studied for the ministry in Oberlin's remarkable coeducational and inter-racial community. Oberlin's evangelical and church-friendly reform ethos would shape her subsequent career as WCTU president. As Evans shows, Willard never fully escaped "her parents antebellum religious ideals that temperance might lead to a more just society. " (87) Although her father never entered the ministry, the Oberlin-inspired values she imbibed growing up on a farm near Janesville, Wisconsin would determine the central contours of her life. Relocating to the dry Methodist community of Evanston, Illinois, Willard was educated at North-Western Female College. In Evanston, which would remain her home for most of her life and continues to be the headquarters for the WCTU, Willard joined the Methodist Episcopal Church and embraced its End Page 235 social and personal perfectionistic idealism. Despite later frustration with the conservatism and sexism of the Methodist hierarchy, she remained deeply indebted to its spirituality and optimism. 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. Like other reformers of the era, Willard was guilty of racism and xenophobia by notably arguing that literate women be given the vote ahead of illiterate Blacks and European immigrants. . .