Her father had, in the early days of revivalism, started an outpouring of grace—as usual in northern New York—inconsiderately but symbolically choosing the harvest period for his labors. Frances was born at Churchville, near Rochester, New York, in 1839, and her mother used often to say to her, “Frank . . . thank heaven you were a welcome child.” When she was two, the family moved to Oberlin which was presently to become known for its type of perfectionist theory and for the many ultraisms which, under Finney and Mahan and Weld, were encouraged there. The general atmosphere of the Willard home may be guessed from a little incident Mrs. Willard relates about Frances. “It was a tiresome journey, for we went by carriage. She often put her little arms around my neck, laid her head upon my shoulder and said, ‘Mamma, sissy’s dress aches!’ It rejoices me to believe that she intuitively recognized the fact that it is not one’s real self that is ever tired, but only this dress of mortality that aches sometimes.”
In her third and fourth years, says her mother, “She used often to go with me to church where President Finney usually preached. She said his great light eyes, white eyebrows, and vigorous manner were to her like a combination of thunder and lightning; lightning in his look, thunder in his voice. I am sure her impressionable spirit became somewhat frightened by the thought of Christianity as administered by that great orator, who was very much given to rehearsing in our hearing the pains and penalties of the condemned.”
She was called “mother’s little infidel” and, for many years, merely reading Finney’s sermons terrified her. She read the Sunday School Advocate and the Slave’s Friend and, at the age of eleven, wept over Uncle Tom’s Cabin but, throughout her life, she grieved sadly “to have missed the helpfulness and sweetness of nature” which she might have learned from Little Lord Fauntleroy: “Happy children of the present, do not fail to read it everyone!” She spoke pieces in public and, at an early age, sent a composition to the Prairie Farmer in Chicago:
“An autumn zephyr came sighing through the branches of a noble elm, which stood like a protecting giant over my cottage home. It shook, half regretfully, I thought, one tiny bough; and down through the gnarled branches of the grand old tree, fell one, two, three, dark crimson leaves.
“The sight, though insignificant, was a sad one to me, then. It reminded me of the similitude existing between leaves and mortals. Both wake to being in a bright beautiful world; both live their appointed season, enjoy their allotted share of happiness, die their inevitable death, and are, alike forgotten. This is the epitome, the simple story of everything that ever existed, save the Eternal God. We all begin life with bright hopes and eager expectancy. In time we leave the stage of action with one conviction—that all is vanity. . . .”
At the age of ten her favorite poem for public recitation was that which ends:
“In vain, alas! in vain, ye gallant few,
From rank to rank your volleyed thunders flew;
Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell,
And Freedom shrieked, as Kosciusko fell!”
Her father and her mother were both studying at Oberlin and the calisthenics practiced there took the place of dancing which “of course,” as good Methodists, they would not learn. She was sensitive because she had red hair, which her mother thoughtfully alluded to as “bright-colored,” and she was always annoyed when the misspelling of her name suggested that she was a boy, although, throughout her life, her intimate friends called her Frank. In her chaotic autobiography she sums up her life in seven main divisions: “a welcome child, a romping girl, a happy student, a roving teacher, the tireless traveler, a Temperance advocate and organizer, and a woman in politics.” She tells how the children played Indian. On Sunday, her father would not shave, or black his boots, or read a letter, or look up a word in the dictionary, and she could not use her slate on Sunday unless she promised to draw nothing but meeting-houses. The actual religious training in the home was comparatively slight. Mr. Willard had been much influenced by the hydropathist, Dr. Jennings, at Oberlin and “If we had sore throats, a cold water compress was put on; when I stepped on a nail, and might easily have had locked-jaw, mother lifted me into the kitchen-sink and pumped water over the aching member; when on a summer morning Oliver’s leg was broken by an ugly ox, his mother sat beside him, attending to the cold-water bandage by night and day for a week. And yet, in the twelve years of our farm life, ‘The Happy Five’ (as I was wont to call them) knew almost nothing about sickness. Our golden rules were these, worthy to be framed beside the entrance door of every home:
“GOLDEN RULES OF HEALTH
Simple food, mostly of vegetables, fish and fowls.
Plenty of sleep, with very early hours for retiring.
Flannel clothing next the skin all the year round; feet kept warm, head cool, and nothing worn tight.
Just as much exercise as possible, only let fresh air and sunshine go together.
No tea or coffee for the children, no alcoholic drink or tobacco for anybody.
Tell the truth and mind your parents.”
Frances wrote little poems on the “felling of the favorite oak” and with her brother and sister, learned to love nature, and was instructed in the patriotism and dignity of their ancestors, some of whom had helped to found Concord where “Emerson, Hawthorne and other literati live.” At the age of fourteen, she made a very pretty sampler. She was then, as always, passionately devoted to her brother and questioned whether it really was God’s will that he should leave home and go to college. She herself was solicitously educated. Some of her relatives taught in Catherine Beecher’s Female College at Milwaukee. She read much, but very few novels.
Once when she was reading a work by the “lonesome-hearted genius” Charlotte Brontë, a long shadow fell across the threshold and her father took the book from her hand. “ ‘Never let my daughter see that book again, if you please, madam,’ he said to the lady of the house, who, not knowing his rules, had hardly noted my proceedings; the book was taken from me, and to this day I have never finished reading Villette.”
In 1859, she had already begun to teach and was reading the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli whose views she found “so essentially correct,” adding that she thinks “Margaret Fuller Ossoli would have been, could have been, was, so far as she went, the greatest of reviewers.” John Halifax was her ideal gentleman and she admires Humboldt, whose death she records in her diary. The girls of her school got autographs from Greeley and Lincoln and a verse of Excelsior by Longfellow; but their request to Queen Victoria failed to get an answer. Frances had already heard Elder Knapp at a revival meeting, but had not “come out.” She had been reading Emerson and she was beginning to believe that, if the Bible was opposed to “known facts,” the Bible was to be rejected. The principal of a woman’s college at Evanston asked prayers on her behalf and she wrote him an extraordinary letter:
“Professor—I thank you very much for the interest you manifested in me and at the same time I feel very guilty.
“I do not think you know how hard my heart is, how far I am from feeling anything. I see I have no excuse to offer for my conduct. Three facts stand out before me as facts, nothing more. I view them calmly, coldly. They are these. I am a great sinner; it is a sin greater than I can comprehend to doubt God, or to refuse submission to him, for a moment. I have no excuse for delaying to become a Christian. The third fact is, I am as cold as an iceberg, as unconcerned as a stone. I am not proud of it, I am not ashamed of it. I view it simply as a truth. I disconnect it from myself. I seem to think that all these things concern others, but do not concern me. You will say that I shall feel in hell (a hard word); I shall see that these things did concern me, when I come to die. I acknowledge it. If there is a God, a heaven, a hell, a devil, then I am undone. I have been taught to think that all these exist, yet from childhood I have doubted.
“I have been told that man feels a lack, a longing for something not possessed, when away from God. Candidly, honestly, I feel no lack
, no want. I would not ask for more happiness than I have always had, if by asking I might obtain it. You will say I ought to be thankful for this to God. I am thankful to something, thankful to whatever had thus blessed me, and I wish I was as sure that a good Spirit ruling the universe had done this, as Christians are.
“If I were to pray, I should say, if I were candid, ‘O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul!’
“It is humiliating for me, the child of pious parents, for whom a thousand prayers have been offered up, to confess this. I had thought no human heart should be permitted to look so deeply into mine. But I think it just that you should know.
“And now, in view of all these facts, I ask, respectfully, yet earnestly, ought I to go to the altar, to kneel before the Christian’s God, to hear the Christian’s prayer, careless and unconcerned? Soon it will be expected that I speak in church. Congratulations will be numerous, that I have ‘returned to the fold,’ and my dark, wicked heart alone shall know how far I have wandered, how hypocritical I am.
“I am willing to attend church, though it interferes very much with my progress in science. I am willing to go, if you think it will do any good, but until I feel differently, I dare not go to the altar again. When I do I will go unasked. I am,
“Gratefully and respectfully yours,
“FRANCES E. WILLARD.”
She was then not twenty. Wayland’s Moral Science, however, persuaded her to say from her heart, “I believe that there is a God and that he is my father.”
Toward the end of her college career she became ill with typhoid and a voice spoke to her saying, “My child, give me thy heart.” Another voice urged her to hold out, but the voice of God was triumphant and she called her mother into the room and said that, if God let her get well, she would try to be a Christian girl.
The following winter, there was a revival at Evanston and, for fourteen nights in succession, she went to the altar rail and was finally baptized in 1861. To the end of her life, the doctrine of the trinity worried her. A few years after her acceptance of grace, she had an experience resembling the sanctification of which Finney spoke, “The conscious emotional presence of Christ through the holy spirit held me,” she says, and she intuitively knew what was right to do; but she went to teach at a school where holiness was not discussed and, at the end of a few months, the rapture of her soul passed away. For the rest of her life she was a good Christian.
She intended always to be a teacher and took a district school near Chicago shortly after she graduated from Evanston. Her progress was rapid. In a short time, she had become head of the Women’s College of the University at Evanston, and was much admired. But presently a question of authority had to be met. Miss Willard, champion, in her way, of women’s rights, developed strong tendencies to tyranny. For the good of the University she demanded restrictions on the free movement of women students. It did not seem right to her that girls should freely go walking with young men. She proposed restraints and worried with honor-systems: she loved honor. The merits of the question were obscured by another: was she, as head of the Women’s College, subordinate to the University? She said no. And as the University would not uphold her, she resigned. This was in 1874 and another event of greater importance to Miss Willard had been taking place at the same time in the neighboring state.
At Hillsboro, Ohio, toward the end of 1873, Diocletian Lewis delivered a lecture.
This was the “beautiful bran-eating Dio,” who desired his name to go down to posterity as the inventor of the gymnastic ring, the wooden dumb-bell, and the beanbag. He was a pioneer in gymnastics with wands and rings and Olympia Brown, an early woman preacher, reports that his Boston school gave very pleasing and graceful exercises. He preferred calisthenics to dancing because of the “mischievous concomitants” of the latter and explained how to have a capital table for ten cents a day. He wrote a famous paper in the North American Review, on corsets, knew the value of night air, and opposed rockers. He invented the spirometer to enlarge the lungs and wrote, “a clean tooth never decays.” He discussed halitosis, which was then known oddly as bad breath, with a great deal of frankness; and his book on Chastity, or Our Secret Sins is extraordinary. In this work he is particularly interested in means to combat lascivious fancies and lewd thoughts. He advises the use of a card on which ten key words, each representing an interesting topic, are written. The moment a voluptuous revery began, the victim was to grasp this card and interest himself in the ten subjects in order until his “subjective incontinence” had passed away.
By a strange combination of circumstances this man was to become the main spring of the successful prohibition movement. Everything that had gone before looked toward Temperance. Dio Lewis himself advocated Temperance. But carried away by his enthusiasm, the women of Hillsboro made an astonishing Christmas gift to the Nation. The preacher had said simply that “if the women would go to the saloons they could soon close them up for ever.” Under the leadership of Mrs. Judge Thompson they went! Carrying their knitting and zephyr work, or embroidery, they first held a morning prayer meeting and then advanced in a long procession to the saloons. Some of them did not even known what saloons looked like. They believed “that those second-rate looking places were barber shops.” The women of Hillsboro asked permission to enter the saloons and to offer prayer there. Miss Willard, who was teaching at the time, followed the movement with interest. Her own ecstatic style is suitable to the event:
“Women gave of their best during the two months of that wonderful uprising. All other engagements were laid aside; elegant women of society walked beside quiet women of home, school, and shop, in the strange processions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of nearly every town and village in the state that was its birthplace, but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices trained in Paris and Berlin sang ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,’ in the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls. Meanwhile, where were the men who patronized these places? Thousands of them signed the pledge these women brought, and accepted their invitation to go back with them to the churches, whose doors, for once, stood open all day long; others slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; but even of these it might be said, that those who came to curse remained to pray. Soon the saloon-keepers surrendered in large numbers, the statement being made by a well-known observer that the liquor traffic was temporarily driven out of two hundred and fifty towns and villages in Ohio and the adjoining states, to which the Temperance Crusade extended. There are photographs extant representing the stirring scenes when, amid the ringing of church-bells, the contents of every barrel, cask, and bottle in a saloon were sent gurgling into the gutter, the owner insisting that women’s hands alone should do this work, perhaps with some dim thought in his muddled mind of the poetic justice due to the Nemesis he thus invoked. And so it came about that soft and often jeweled hands grasped ax and hammer, while the whole town assembled to rejoice in this new fashion of exorcising the evil spirits. In Cincinnati, a city long dominated by the liquor trade, a procession of women including the wives of leading pastors, was arrested and locked up in jail; in Cleveland, dogs were set on the crusaders, and in a single instance, a blunderbuss was pointed at them, while in several places, they were smoked out, or had the hose turned on them. But the arrested women marched through the streets singing, and held a temperance meeting in the prison; the one assailed by dogs laid her hands upon their heads and prayed; and the group menaced by a gun marched up to its mouth singing, ‘Never be afraid to work for Jesus.’ The annals of heroism have few pages so bright as the annals of that strange crusade, spreading as if by magic, through all the Northern States, across the sea and to the Orient itself. Everywhere it went, the attendance at church increased incalculably, and the crime record was in like manner shortened. Men say there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew before; a sense of God and of human brotherhood.”
The crusade failed. In one or two cities it lasted through the wint
er, and Miss Willard herself entered a saloon in Pittsburgh, in the spring of 1874, and prayed in the sawdust. A week later, she was president of the Chicago Women’s Christian Temperance Union which she calls “the sober second thought of the Crusade.” For seventy years men had been organizing temperance work and had addressed themselves to drunkards trying to effect a personal reform and to restore backsliders. With the Women’s Crusade, the Temperance movement changed its objective. It attacked not the drinker, but the drink. It threw itself against the saloon. It changed, in fact, though not in name, from temperance to prohibition.
It was her enthusiasm for the Crusade which led Frances Willard to accept an unsalaried position as a Temperance worker at the very moment when she was offered the post of lady principal in an elegant school for young women at a salary of $2,400 a year. Her choice of life work is a decisive event in the social history of America, for she alone is responsible for the two great changes in tactics which eventually lifted prohibition from the status of fanaticism. Overcoming incredible obstacles, Frances Willard compelled the W.C.T.U., of which she soon became the dominant figure, to adopt suffrage as a means and to support the Prohibition Party.
The rightness of suffrage came to her by divine inspiration. She was secretary of the national, and president of the Chicago, W.C.T.U. when, one Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio, the call came to her: “Upon my knees alone, in the room of my hostess, who was a veteran Crusader, there was borne in upon my mind, as I believe, from loftier regions, the declaration, ‘You are to speak for woman’s ballot as a weapon of protection to her home and tempted loved ones from the tyranny of drink.’” But when she offered to speak on the “Home Protection Ballot,” permission was withheld by the head of the W.C.T.U. In the autumn of 1876, she made a complete declaration at the end of which the presiding officer said, “I wish it clearly understood that the speaker represents herself and not the W.C.T.U., for we do not propose to trail our skirts through the mire of politics.” What the rank and file felt may be judged by one story:
The Stammering Century Page 33
