18 February: Boreham on Frances Willard

A Champion Of Womanhood
No monument at Washington is more admired and honoured than that of Frances Willard, the anniversary of whose death will be marked by the women of the world today. For, with a subtle and spiritual genius peculiar to herself, she found a way of her own of making history. As her eminent contemporary and compatriot, John Greenleaf Whittier, sang of her:

She knew the power of banded ill,
But felt that love was stronger
still;
And organised for doing good
The world's united
womanhood.

Frances Willard was essentially a child of the woods, a daughter of the prairies. Almost her entire girlhood was spent in that out-of-the-way home, far from the beaten track, enfolded by the vast and impenetrable solitudes. Frances could just remember the family's migration to that lonely spot. Her father's health having given cause for anxiety, they had decided to shake the dust of cities and towns from their feet, and to plunge into the unknown West. Frances was seven at the time. She always remembered helping to load all their furniture and belongings into the three covered waggons in which the great pilgrimage was to be made. Her father drove the first, her brother the second, her mother the third. In that third waggon, perched on her father's writing-desk, sat Frances and her little sister. Their big Newfoundland dog trotted wonderingly behind. For three weeks the caravan jogged patiently along. Each stage of the rough journey had its own weird and bewildering experiences. Once the horse that was being driven by the mother sank into the quicksand almost to its ears. But, however hardly such difficulties may have pressed upon the parents, to the children it was all a splendid picnic.

Imbibing In Girlhood The Freedom of The Wilds
It was a picturesque little nest they built for themselves in that vast leafy wilderness—a cottage with rambling roof, old-fashioned gables, dormer windows, quaint little porches, crannies, and unsuspected nooks—bounded by the broad river on the one side and the densely wooded hills, fading away into infinity, on the other. If, in those gay and careless days, one had paid a surprise visit to that hideout in the prairies, he would probably have discovered the whereabouts of the two sisters by the peals of laughter echoing down the valley; and, on reaching the spot, he would have found Frances mounted on her favourite heifer and Mary trailing behind on a goat. Frances was a born romp. One could call her "madcap," "harum-scarum," "scapegrace" or any other nickname that came to the tongue so long as it implied no reference to her colourful hair. Any such jibe touched her on a very tender spot.

In the hectic years of her subsequent public career, Frances never threw off the atmosphere of those days in the wild. Nor had she any wish to do so. At Forest Home she made friends with every oriole that flashed through the groves of hickory, every thrush that sang among the branches of the oaks, every quail that fluttered through the stubble, every gopher that peeped shyly from its hole in the bank, and every squirrel that looked cheekily down from its home in the fir. Her father was a devoted naturalist, always carrying in his pocket a selection of tiny implements that would enable him to take all sorts of observations in the endless woods. And every Sunday afternoon Mrs. Willard would take the girls to a shady pleasaunce of her own, away in the corner of the orchard, and, snipping a sprig of fennel or caraway, or pointing to some pretty flower or piping bird or fleecy cloud, would tell her daughters things that enabled their bright eyes to see through the veil of Nature to Nature's inmost heart.

From Love Of Nature to Love Of Humanity
When, later on, she passed from the prairie to the college, she impressed everybody by her gaiety, her intelligence and her resistless charm. She earned for herself the sobriquet of "the little infidel." "I was not naturally one who took things for granted," she says. "It was intuitive with me to seek causes and for reasons." She was forever startling her parents and teachers with her "How?" and "Why?" and "How do you know?" But, suspicious as she was, she resented the charge of positive unbelief. She was under a spell, not of great negations, but of great interrogations. She denied nothing; she was hungry for knowledge; she was eagerly feeling her way. Faith came to her as the reward of a patient and open-minded quest. From being a scholar, she became a teacher. Her heart sank into her boots when she beheld her first school-house—an ugly dismal little shack, dirty beyond description, with broken windows, cracked floor and the corners draped in cobwebs. Lonely to the point of heartbreak, she would sit down when her last pupil had gone home and indulge in a good cry. But this was merely the beginning. Later on she became president of her own old college at Evanston and was wonderfully proud of her "beautiful garden of girls." There, enthroned in the hearts of all, she reigned like a queen.

It was at this stage that she made two startling discoveries. The first was that she possessed in a remarkable degree, the power of public speech. Those who listened to her utterance experienced a "lyric rapture" that wrought them into a "delirium of anticipation." Her second discovery was the sheer lovableness of humanity. Abandoning her secluded and academic career, she became an evangelist, a reformer, a philanthropist. She really fell in love with what she called "the great unwashed, unkempt, ungospelled, sin-scarred multitude." During the years that remained we see her, sometimes with Moody, sometimes with Gough, sometimes alone, moving among drunkards, criminals, and outcasts, always striving to redeem those whom very few women would have cared to touch. It was thus that she won the affection and the admiration that eventually expressed itself in the noble statue at Washington, a statue that, half buried in flowers, the Congress of the United States unveiled on one of the most notable days in its illustrious history.

F W Boreham