A Tale of Two Franceses—Temperance and Suffragism in the United States

Chapter 13 examines the Reconstruction Era struggle for women’s rights and African American rights through the American Equal Rights Association, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), especially the WCTU activism of acclaimed black writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Born of the so-called Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873–1974, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU would become the most successful woman’s organization of all time. Willard’s Do Everything campaign expanded women’s activism, both nationally and globally. Despite racial tensions within the WCTU, temperance activism provided the main avenue of political organization for women across the Reconstruction-Era South, both black and white. By the 1890s Willard had made common cause between not just temperance, equal rights, antilynching leagues, and suffragist movements, but—as a Christian socialist—with both the domestic and international labor movement as well.

Claiming the Call to Preach

Claiming the Call to Preach traces the history of call through the nineteenth century, at a time when the question of women’s call to preach, although seemingly fixed by ecclesial authority and cultural convention, was being raised by courageous women in different settings, through different genres, and to different effect. This book recovers the neglected narrative of women’s call to preach through the historical accounts and rhetorical witness of four groundbreaking women preachers: Jarena Lee, Frances Willard, Louisa Woosley, and Florence Spearing Randolph. Scholarship has been written on women who have preached in history, but not on how they managed to claim their call to preach despite the restrictions of gender inequality. This project explores the question: how did women claim their call to preach? Through feminist hermeneutics, this book examines call narratives which used rhetorical strategies to articulate effective arguments for women’s call to the preaching ministry of the church. In response, these women received endorsement of their claims to pulpit places, engaged in sacred persuasive speech, and preached as ministers of the sacred office. This project examines women’s call to preach—the history and theology, rhetoric and practice, struggle and success, and the necessary work of interpretation and re-interpretation through call narratives. This book concludes with practical applications for contemporary homiletics, showing how historical tradition can be re-invented in order to give women—and anyone struggling with their call to preach—rhetorical tactics and narrative scripts in order to make effective claims to preach today.

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.

“A Different Ideal”

This chapter discusses Beginning Again in 1963, where Leonard Woolf describes how in his first year of marriage he was induced to join a Care Committee of the Charity Organization Society (COS) branch in Hoxton. It recounts how Marny Vaughan and Stella Duckworth carried on the mission of their mothers' generation through her ongoing participation in the COS. It also highlights Virginia Woolf's refined ideas about philanthropy in relation to her husband's emerging political interests and her developing sense of women's political activism. The chapter refers to Ray Strachey's biography of Frances Willard in November 1912, which accompanied Leonard on a fortnight's research trip to factories and cooperative stores. It talks about the maternal–imperialist strain of women's political work that continued to exasperate Woolf.

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.

American Religion, American Politics

Despite the centrality of separation of church and state in American government, religion has played an important role in the nation's politics from colonial times through the present day. This essential anthology provides a fascinating history of religion in American politics and public life through a wide range of primary documents. It explores contentious debates over freedom, tolerance, and justice, in matters ranging from slavery to the nineteenth-century controversy over Mormon polygamy to the recent discussions concerning same-sex marriage and terrorism. Bringing together a diverse range of voices from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular traditions and the words of historic personages, from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Frances Willard to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., this collection is an invaluable introduction to one of the most important conversations in America's history.