Frances E. (Frances Elizabeth) Willard

author

Frances E. (Frances Elizabeth) Willard

1839–1898

A powerful voice in the 19th-century reform movement, she helped turn temperance into a wider campaign for women’s rights, education, and social change. Best known for leading the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she became one of the most influential American reformers of her era.

1 Audiobook

A wheel within a wheel : $b How I learned to ride the bicycle, with some reflections by the way

A wheel within a wheel : $b How I learned to ride the bicycle, with some reflections by the way

by Frances E. (Frances Elizabeth) Willard

About the author

Born in 1839, Frances E. Willard was an American educator, lecturer, writer, and reformer whose work reached far beyond the temperance cause. After working in education and serving as president of Evanston College for Ladies, she became nationally known for her leadership in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Willard believed reform movements were connected, and she pushed the WCTU to address issues including women’s suffrage, labor conditions, public health, and prison reform. Her organizing skill, public speaking, and wide travel helped build the group into a major force in American public life, and she also helped found the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

She wrote extensively, including an autobiography, and remained a prominent public figure until her death in 1898. Remembered as one of the best-known reform leaders of the late 1800s, she played an important role in linking the fight against alcohol abuse with a broader vision of social and political progress for women.