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Christopher Evans's new biography of educator, temperance crusader, and women's suffragist Frances Willard (1839–1898) is insightful, timely, and adds greatly to our understanding of a much-forgotten figure in US history. "Perhaps no woman," writes Evans, "did more to expand opportunities for women's rights in the late 19th century than Frances Willard. As a reformer, Willard carved out a distinctive path of women's activism that remains largely misunderstood." Evans tells the story anew of one of America's most significant agitators and engaged Christian activists. The writing is lively, and the research is exemplary. I especially appreciate Evans's reimagining of Willard's life within the context of all the difficult contingencies of the past. The book carries with it a certain caution about presentism and anachronism. For instance, Evans notes that "1920, the year when national prohibition went into effect, was a very different historical context from 1870, when Frances Willard was on the verge of launching her public career."1The world of ardent prohibitionism is, in many ways, lost to us. After the repeal of prohibition with the 21st Amendment in 1933, prohibition's critics were ready to bury it six feet under, along with corsets, top hats, petticoats, and all the hallowed ideals of Victorians. H. L. Mencken, one of the fiercest of these critics, lambasted the many hypocrisies of prohibition almost 100 years ago. "Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. . . . There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished."2 Mencken considered Frances Willard to be a ridiculous character. With tongue in cheek, he ranked her with Daniel Drew, Brigham Young, and Anthony Comstock as his "favorite characters in American history."3I think there is a tendency to view Willard, her life, and her influence through a post-repeal lens. Evans is right to caution us on this point. The urgent crusade of prohibitionists is part of a bygone age. That can be seen in the long, steady decline of Willard's WCTU, her life work, which went from a peak of over 372,355 in 1931 to an estimated 5,000 in the 21st century. Willard's life, in part, helps us understand the urgency of the crusade and the appeal it had for the masses.4On this and other matters Evans's book is fascinating and generative. There are so many topics it explores with skill and verve. One could take up any number of them, including: the tensions between private piety and public activism, Willard's homosocial/same sex intimate relationships, Willard as a social pioneer (speeding along in her bicycle that she named Gladys), the possibilities and real limits of women's political engagement in these years, and any number of others. But in the interest of brevity, I'd like to focus on some of the seeming tensions or even shortcomings that Evans' highlights. Those being: Willard's growing political radicalism and the splintering of Protestantism, the anti-immigrant aspect of the temperance movement, and what might be called Willard's Protestant whiteness.First, what about the anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and related anti-Catholic dimensions of Willard's work in the context of the larger movement? Evans observes that "Although Willard often expressed sympathy toward the thousands of new immigrants coming from Germany, Italy, and eastern Europe, she frequently castigated immigrants for their alleged immorality, especially their drinking habits."5 In my reading of late-19th and early 20th century sources and the secondary literature, I've found anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant prejudice throughout the temperance crusade. Anti-Catholicism went hand-in-hand with the anti-liquor campaign. President of the Massachusetts WCTU Mary Livermore thought that "no Catholic should hold office in our country whose political allegiance is to the Pope, first."6 Early in the 20th century, the newly-formed holiness Church of the Nazarene, noted Timothy Smith, condemned the saloon as "the 'rallying place' of Roman Catholic immigrants, whose contributions to political corruption, pauperism, and crime seemed to need no documentation."7 Such lines of reasoning were hardly novel. Yet, did Willard's ecumenism do much to counter such bigotry? I'm also wondering just how central this religious prejudice and xenophobia was to the movement in the 1880s and 90s.I'm interested as well in the slowly growing divide, that Evans touches on, between what we might call conservative or traditional evangelicals and more liberal Protestants. Is there much truth here to the so-called Great Reversal? Other scholars dubbed it the "Great Split," whereby "Public Christians" and "Private Christians," or proto-modernists and proto-fundamentalists, parted ways. For those we might call conservatives or traditionalists, reformers seemed to be neglecting the heart piety of the faith. Mark Noll sums it up like this: "Protestants who had once guided national life retreated from efforts at shaping society in order to cultivate private gardens of inward spiritual development; and when potentially innovative religious convictions (Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish) were only inching toward broad public commentary on economic issues."8 Willard rejected the prevailing late-century apocalypticism, which so captured the imaginations of other conservative white Protestants. There's also the influence of the early social gospel on Willard and her edging toward labor and political radicalism. The cast of characters and movements she identified with or sympathized with is stunning: Terrence Powderly and the Knights of Labor, Edward Bellamy, "Gospel Socialism," etc. Certainly, Dwight Moody would have disapproved. So, what role did Willard play, if any, in the fracturing of Protestantism?In other ways Willard was anything but radical. On the issue of race and temperance, I found Evans's comments about the Willard-Ida B. Wells controversy especially noteworthy. In the 1890s the African-American activist and journalist Wells accused Willard of demonizing Blacks, and particularly Black men, as brutes who drank heavily and raped white women. That language, Wells argued, had led to lynchings and other forms of retributive violence. In 1894 Wells, who was in Manchester, England, weighed in on the controversy in the pages of the Chicago Inter Ocean. She had been asked what she made of the positions Willard and evangelist Dwight Moody had taken. "I have been compelled in the interest of truth," Wells remarked, "to say that they have given the weight of their influence to the Southern white man's prejudices. Mr. Moody has encouraged the drawing of the color line in the churches by consenting to preach on a separate day and then a separate church to the colored people in his tours through the South." Wells thought Willard had actually harmed the cause of Black freedom even more than Moody had. Willard had slandered African Americans "in order to gain favor with those who are hanging, shooting, and burning Negroes alive."9 African Methodist Episcopal minister D. P. Seaton, who had pastored in Wilmington and Baltimore, praised the reform efforts of Ida Wells and denounced the work of Willard. In an 1894 conference speech, Seaton pointed out Willard's 1890 article in the Voice. "This good lady," he said with sarcasm, "taking for truth statements of certain whites in the South, tried to impress her English friends that we are so deeply lost in debauchery that the safety of home, of womanhood and childhood are measured by the greatest dark-faced mobs of a thousand localities . . ." Ida B. Wells, he noted, "met this wholesale truth and refuted it in the presence of Miss Willard in London . . ."10 In the heated back-and-forth, Willard defended her record. Willard's myopic rebuttal, Evans writes, "underscored the problem of well-meaning whites who sought to speak for African Americans without coming to terms with the deeper problems of racism."11Willard's reaching out to, and sympathizing with, southern white women was certainly part of a larger trend in post-Reconstruction America. For Willard, as Evans observes, prohibition was "the nation's best hope in healing the sectional divisions of the Civil War, uniting citizens regardless of region or race."12 Reuniting the country after the Civil War dominated the attention of elite whites in the North and the South. Historians David Blight, Heather Cox Richardson, and Nina Silber have written about what this campaign often entailed. It typically meant turning away from Blacks and former slaves, making excuses concerning lynching, or compromising on the issues of Black civil rights and legal protections. Blight describes this as a tension between healing and justice. As Blight aptly sums it up, "For many whites, especially veterans and their family members, healing from the war was simply not the same proposition as doing justice to the four million emancipated slaves and their descendants."13Louise Newman's 1999 book White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States lays out some of the themes around race, prohibitionism, and white supremacy. Newman focuses particularly on the ways that the early women's movement used the language of uplift, civilization, and empire to bolster their place in a larger white world. "Perhaps the most popular exponent of this type of reasoning was Frances Willard," she says. "For many white Americans Willard represented 'womanhood's apotheosis.' In the words of one contemporary, Willard was the 'personification of consummate feminine excellence in thought, purpose and performance.'" Drawing on the work of Ian Tyrrell, Newman then points out that Willard imagined a racial order that "linked 'advanced civilization' to women's emancipation within Christian societies." Willard's promotion of a "white life" is particularly telling. "On the surface," notes Newman, "Willard's call for 'a white life' might seem an innocuous metaphor. Yet Willard, like most white Protestant elites in this period, conflated moral differences with racial and religious differences—only white Christian men were considered moral human beings."14 For Newman, this ties in with Willard's insistence on an educational qualification for voting rights. I'm curious about the degree to which Willard was part of a larger pattern. Like other eastern whites, and members of Republican Party, Willard could claim an abolitionist and even radical upbringing. Yet the shift away from the cause of Black freedom and equality was profound in the Reconstruction Era and later.All that said, I think it's always the mark of an excellent work of history or biography that it generates questions and makes us think about how the past resonates in our present. For me, this is part of what Evans's book has done so well. I'd like to conclude with the related words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., from a piece in the New York Review of Books back in 2006: "Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present. When new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian's spotlight shifts . . ."15 Randall StephensChristopher Evans has written a monumental biography, an incredibly well-balanced and well documented account that sheds new light on a complex and underappreciated figure. Willard's contributions to gender equality and social reform have been widely overshadowed by the iconic figures of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and others. Stanton may be partly to blame for that oversight since she and Willard had a difficult relationship and thus did not include Willard in the volumes she wrote on the history of women's suffrage. Willard was only added in later volumes that Anthony, a great admirer of Willard, wrote after Stanton's death.While Willard's role in the history of women's rights has been eclipsed by the more radical "natural rights" feminists, after reading Do Everything a strong case could be made that her mobilization and empowerment of more traditional "religious women" may have done more to advance women's rights at that time than the standard-bearers of the women's suffrage movement. Yet she has been slow to be appreciated by modern second wave feminists. It took until the year 2000 for her to be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.16I appreciated Evans's frank discussion about Willard's sexuality, which earlier biographers have been reluctant to engage in. She had romantic relationships with many women and several intimate long-term same-sex relationships. Fortunately for Willard, she lived in a small window of time when relationships of love between women were broadly accepted, only later in the early 20th century did such relationships begin to be viewed differently (as lesbian and deviant). But in her lifetime intimate relationships with women were acceptable for middle class educated white women, especially those who engaged in charitable work.I would be interested to learn more though, about how she struggled to find her love of women (which she described in her journal a number of times as "unnatural") acceptable to God and to her "beloved mother church." Excerpts from her journal reveal her intense struggle in this regard, her view of herself as sinful, and her struggle to accept that God loved her. Evans explores her "paradoxical relationship" with her church in Methodism's exclusion of women's leadership and denial of her call to be preacher, but I would guess that her sexuality would be included in her "paradoxical relationship" with the church. I find a certain irony in the fact that a woman like Willard, so gifted in preaching and leadership, but who found love in same-sex relationships, would even today, be barred from clergy in the Methodist church.I was invited to review this book because I have been researching and writing about one of Willard's closest friends and staunch feminist ally, Hannah Whitall Smith, who held several leadership roles in the WTCU, wrote the introduction to Willard's autobiography, and introduced Willard to Isabel Somerset, Willard's final partner and soulmate. Smith's granddaughter, Ray Strachey (whom she largely raised) wrote an early glowing biography of Willard in 1913, using her grandmother's letters and memories as a primary source. (Ray was a fervent feminist who also wrote a history of women's suffrage.)17One of the fascinations for me in reading this biography is to see the many commonalities between these intimate friends, one being how "difficult it is to place an ideological label" on them as Evans admits, and "the difficulty of drawing straight lines between past and present."18 Smith, like Willard, was a woman of multiple identities, impossible to categorize. Both were deeply impacted by the Holiness revival and found the holiness and evangelical tradition of their era to be empowering and a source of strength and liberation. And both were admired by conservative evangelicals even though they were avid, outspoken feminists. Both were drawn to Christian socialism and gave labor union speeches, and at the same time were drawn to aristocratic elites. Both read F. D. Maurice and were influenced by his socialist ideals. Both women became quite progressive and ecumenical in later life, yet still harbored unacknowledged racial biases.Both women remained what I would call, loyal radicals, each in their own way, within their respective religious communities. Both questioned strict orthodoxy, Willard as a Methodist, Hannah as a Quaker. Smith enjoyed calling herself a heretic, but Willard, as the more public figure, had to be diplomatic and more circumspect.Willard remained a loyal Methodist, despite failure of her denomination to ordain women. Hannah despite her lifelong attachment to her Quaker identity, struggled to fit within the traditional Orthodox Quakerism she inherited. Yet both women were sustained and motivated to social reform by their respective faiths.Unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and some of the more radical suffragists, both Willard and Smith, read the bible as a book liberating woman rather than oppressing them. Smith was a born feminist, and her egalitarianism was in her Quaker DNA. She did not face the sexual discrimination from her Quaker community to the degree that Willard did within Methodism. Both women were keenly aware that the rhetoric of "spiritual equality" masked gendered hierarchy within their denominations. And for both women their religious belief was wedded to a political radicalism that went far beyond the status quo of their denominations.It might be shocking to evangelical Christians today to discover that there was a time when evangelical Protestants loved socialism. Evangelicals who read Evans's biography will be surprised that many of Willard's political positions correspond to left-wing radical policies rather than right wing conservative issues; that theologically she could be both "liberal" and "evangelical" and a forerunner of liberation theology, and her feminism, though couched in the language of "home protection," was focused on the liberation of women from the domination of men and the power of patriarchy.It seems clear by Evans's account that Willard used the prohibitionist fight to advance her even greater goal—woman suffrage and gender equity. Debate will no doubt continue to revolve around whether she used "home protection" as a ploy to gain the support of conservative women for suffrage and other radical reforms, which included socialist programs and policies.Willard's first book was a biography of her sister, Mary, who died young of typhoid fever, as way to ease her grief.19 Smith's first book was a biography of her son, Frank, written to ease her grief after he died suddenly while a student at Princeton.20 Smith and Willard were both best-selling writers who engaged biography as therapy and a way to process their grief.Both women explored the religious experimentation of new esoteric movements that flourished in the 19th century, such as spiritualism, seances, mind cure, phrenology. I was intrigued to learn that Willard was drawn to spiritualism, theosophy, and other "New Thought" movements, as were other evangelical women of the time. Evangelicalism in the Gilded Age was a much larger tent than it has become today.The image of God as mother was one avenue that brought Smith to universalism. It was her image of God as feminine, maternal, and infinitely loving and merciful, that convinced her that salvation must be universal. It appears that the motherhood of God also played a role in Willard's movement towards universalism. Evans suggests that Willard may have conflated her own mother with God, and he notes that she often spoke of the "mother-heart" of Christ and his unconditional love. Smith too often referred to the "mother-heart" of God and of God's unconditional love which will never shut the door of salvation to anyone.While Willard and Smith were both evangelical universalists, Smith felt much freer to express her heterodoxy than Willard did as president of the WCTU. Smith was public about her view of final restitution and often proudly expressed her confidence in her religious nonconformity. Both Smith and Willard were boundary-pushers all their life.And in death too, they challenged traditional norms one last time— choosing as their final wishes to be cremated—a radical stance challenging a long-standing Christian tradition. While gaining adherents at the end the 19th century, cremation was still a controversial practice, opposed by the churches, but chosen by many of the leading suffragists, including, Anthony, Stanton, Stone, and Willard and Smith. Carole SpencerChristopher Evans provides a careful and thoroughly documented study of the life, work, and world of one of the often mentioned, but little known, and certainly understudied, women of the 19th century. Frances Willard was, during her lifetime, one of the best-known members of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She achieved this fame as the long-time leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). However, that fame evaporated as social and political realities shifted. The biography fills an important gap in Methodist and women's history, primarily in the United States but with important implications for Methodist and related movements in the UK and beyond. The work is also an important contribution toward understanding the WCTU through describing and analysing the inner workings of the WCTU, which was inseparable from the energy and drive of Willard. The volume constitutes a major advance in the refinement of the places in American religion and culture of Frances Willard, Methodism, and the temperance controversies.Evans traces Willard's life, with attention to persons who supported and/or influenced the trajectory of her work, including well known figures like Asa Mahan, Catharine Beecher, D. L. Moody, Anna Howard Shaw, Judith Ellen Horton Foster, Hannah Whitall Smith, Isobel Somerset, and Anna Gordon. Her contacts are a "who is who" of late nineteenth century reformist activists. All these relationships were complicated, as one would expect from a person whose moto was "do everything." Evans sensitively discusses these often-fraught connections. He deftly analyses the impact on Willard and her organisation of post-Civil War politics (on local, regional, and national levels) in the USA, as well as issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class during the period. The narrative also presents carefully nuanced analyses of political struggles within the WCTU, especially between those who wanted to focus only on alcohol and Willard who insisted on a link with women's suffrage.Willard appears as strong, troubled, often lonely, driven, stubborn, entrepreneurial, moving toward opportunities rather than always following her plans. She both transcends her context and is bound by it. She seems too grateful for the cooperation of her "social betters," willing to marginalize African Americans, Native Americans, and others in her eagerness to reconcile with White southerners. These proclivities resulted in a lack of cooperation with the lower and middle class focused groups often struggling to implement reforms such as the ones she was undertaking, and, unfortunately, it validated the larger society's racism and classism.Willard is therefore interesting case study in the history of Methodism as lived by the post-Civil War Methodist Episcopal Church in the North and its alienated sibling church in the South. A layperson in the northern MEC, she displayed social prejudices, goals, desire for reconciliation, and yearning for reform similar to those of many other activists of her church, but also the attraction to upward social mobility. Converted through the ministry of Bishop Mathew Simpson, then educated and as an educator in Methodist Episcopal institutions, she worked with future Bishop Charles Fowler, President of Northwestern University; Willard was President of the Women's branch of the same University. The two were engaged to be married, but the romance failed because of differences on substantive issues. Fowler later was a presiding bishop at the 1888 General Conference to which Willard presented her properly-in-order credentials as a representative of the Rock River Conference; the General Conference voted not to seat her and other women delegates, reaffirming the second-class status of women in the Methodist Episcopal Church.One is in awe of what Willard accomplished as leader of the WCTU and its interrelated organisations. Unlike in Europe, the active and latent religiosity of USA culture gave Willard a platform, committed volunteer activists, sources of funding, and religious and political language with which to communicate. Willard and her supporters fought to maintain her influence and to implement her ideas. She was an excellent politician, able to convince people of the vision that freedom from alcohol and allowing women to vote, with women having equal rights with men, would benefit all citizens. Freedom from alcohol and gender discrimination, she argued, would empower the poor and oppressed. Her friendships with large numbers of women, and her intuitive political skills, were key to her successes. Even as her leadership of the WCTU was challenged and her physical energies waned, she remained a formidable force.Despite the efforts of Willard and the WCTU and other organisations, there remained a determined lack of attention to women's issues, social justice, and addictions among the leadership of the churches, political parties, and ecumenical organisations. The Prohibition Party seated women as delegates from its inception in 1869, reflecting the abolitionist heritage of most activists.21 Her Prohibition Party involvement and the initial success of Prohibition damaged her reputation among later historians, even though prohibition of alcohol did not become law in the USA until 1919, more than two decades after her death, a law repealed in 1933. Her legacy has also been tarnished by her racism, anti-immigration, and anti-Catholicism. The latter two prejudices certainly had to do with her perception of the use of alcohol and marginalisation of women. Evans has delt perceptively with these issues.The better the book, the more questions that seem to beg for consideration. First, the women, and supportive men, including most mentioned in the volume, were part of already established networks developing before the WCTU or concurrently, some dominated by or substantially influenced by women. One thinks especially of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society which had a presence in most Methodist Episcopal Church congregations. Those overlapping loyalties and the credibility these women (and some men) gave to the WCTU on local, state, national and international levels are worthy of consideration as a historiographical problem. How did the personnel, values, cultural roles overlap and how were they different? Some of these are mentioned by Evans, but there are more that could be discussed among the influential reform movements of society and movements of spirituality whose anti-alcohol, women's work, and social activism during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era of USA history sometimes paralleled that of the WCTU.Second, this biography provides another touchstone for intercultural comparison of temperance and women's movements. In the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia, different historical contexts were problematic for an approach like that of the WCTU and Willard in particular. Even when the networks overlapped, as they did for the UK and USA, issues of nationalism, class, religious establishment, and gender developed differently. The European Continent was not ready for an American-led war on alcohol. The WCTU was always marginal to European experience and discourse, but it had a virtual "presence" in other contexts because of ascending American political and military power. As such, WCTU efforts to globalise its mission may even have been detrimental to the discussion of social issues posed by alcohol abuse in those contexts.For example, a WCTU visitor to Paris lamented that under the leadership of the President of the French WCTU, Josephine de Broen (who was not French), "nothing had ever been done" other than post a sign in a storefront in an impoverished area Belleville, a section of the city still being punished economically and socially for French Commune.22 As Victoria Afanasyeva noted, French temperance efforts were "elitist, masculine and medical" as well as "anti-cosmopolitan," being opposed both to international temperance cooperation and involvement of the lower classes.23 Unsurprisingly entire histories of the development of temperance in France were earlier written without significant reference to women.24Thus, the positive and negative aspects of Willard's international influence also need to be considered more fully. Important attention is given to the UK by Evans. For France and Francophone Switzerland, the work of Josephine Butler (a friend and usually a supporter of Willard), Lucy Peugeot (Ruban Bleu), Sarah Monod (organizer of women, also supported by Butler), and the related temperance and women's movements are worthy of more attention. The Croix Bleue/Blaue Kreutz work of Lucien Rochat and Arnold Bovet, inter alia, was crucial for Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, as well as France.25 Like Willard, perhaps even more so, these European campaigners were embedded in the Radical Holiness Movements of Switzerland. In Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia, the situation was quite complicated, as the work of Mark Schrad has demonstrated.26 The implications of the campaigns of the WCTU, the Ruban Blu, the Croix Bleue, and others for temperance and women's rights still needs additional work to identify networks and cultural values as a base for comparative analysis. As Ian Tyrell noted, Willard and the WCTU were "Testing the Limits of Internationalism."27A French connection of Willard may be related, and might be profitably pursued, that is, Willard's efforts to publicize the plight of refugees from the Armenian genocide and provide aid in the port city of Marseille. Evans describes briefly Willard's efforts.28 It is worth noting that this was also an issue supported by Francis William Crossley, British Radical Holiness religious and social activist and industrialist. Crossley was deeply moved by the plight of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He funded the travel and research and publication of the resulting volume by
Evans et al. (Mon,) studied this question.