Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard

Chapter 4 narrates the life and public reform of Frances Willard. A female public speaker and writer, Willard took on the cult of domesticity and the strict gender roles enforced in the American Industrial Age. Facing gender inequality, Willard fought for women’s rights and social reform, serving as the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In addition to describing Willard’s life, this chapter examines the use of her public platform and the authority of her public rhetoric to influence the lives of women seeking equal opportunities. Analyzing her narrative of cultural reform in her two books, How to Win: A Book for Girls and Woman in the Pulpit, this chapter explores the rhetorical tactics Willard used to effectively argue for equality and egalitarianism for women in church and society.

The Pink Tea Stage

During the 19-teens, the Kentucky suffrage movement's momentum began to build. Groups like the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Kentucky Education Association pledged support for suffrage, demonstrating its new identity as a mainstream cause. KERA especially targeted men in their efforts to win new converts. The cause still struggled, however, in rural Kentucky. Only by acknowledging deeply rooted values centered on God, family, and community would the suffrage movement gain headway there.

Women’s History and Religious Innovation

Scholars agree in discerning discrepancies between men and women in discussions of secularization, yet often base such discussions on relatively shallow social survey data about individual piety. This chapter points away from views of women’s religiosity as a private matter towards the role of women’s organizations in public life. Such groups epitomize the voluntarism that is often suggested as an explanation of the vibrancy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious movements in the United States, in contrast to secularization in Europe. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in particular offers opportunities for comparison. When its leader, Frances Willard, relocated to England, she expected to generate the same enthusiasm that had made her one of the most influential women leaders in America. The attempt foundered on the lack of receptivity among British women for Willard’s famous ‘Do Everything’ policy, an attempt they viewed as distinctively American.

Questioning Similarities: Prohibition in the United States and Finland

Only two republics have ever adopted national alcohol prohibition in peacetime, and they did so at almost exactly the same time. For these reasons and others, historians of temperance have considered prohibition in Finland and the United States to be essentially similar. In fact, despite originating at the same time, the two are quite dissimilar. American prohibition came out of Protestant revivalism and a capitalist desire for worker efficiency. By the late nineteenth century two powerful temperance organizations, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti- Saloon League, had emerged to lead the movement for domestic prohibition and to evangelize for prohibition abroad. Prohibition in Finland came out of the movement to achieve a cultural and political nationalism. Temperance was part of the Turku academics’ attempt to create a virtuous unified peasantry and working class. The working class, in particular, used the temperance movement to organize their movements. While the United States and Finland were the only two republics to undertake national prohibition, the US largely ignored the Finnish experiment. They praised it in the early 1920s only to emphasize its later failures as a way of trying to obscure their own inability to achieve a viable policy.