Frances Willard

This volume is a biography of Francis Willard (1839-98) who became president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879 and remained active in that role throughout the 1890s. She devoted most of her life to building the women's organization that eventually secured the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Using previously unavailable diaries, the author argues that the WCTU was the first mass organization of American women and that Willard's emphasis on womanliness and domesticity were not conservative, but rather paired with radical social ideas. Willard is characterized as having a philosophy that is a meld of womanliness, Christian socialism, equal rights, and concern for nurturance.