Frances Willard

A large contingent of women walked down Market Street in Pittsburgh arm-in-arm in 1873. They stopped at Sheffner’s Saloon, but the saloonkeeper refused them entrance. The women circled at the curb, sang a hymn, and were led in prayer by a woman whose son had succumbed to alcohol. They marched to a second saloon and the innkeeper permitted them to come inside. The leader of this women’s brigade placed her Bible on the bar and read a Psalm followed by a rousing rendition of “Rock of Ages.” As the women knelt for prayer, the leader asked Frances Willard (1839-1898) to pray. Frances described it as “my crusade baptism.” It led to the creation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) a year later. At their organizing meeting, Frances wrote in her role as Corresponding Secretary, “We will go forward in the strength of Him who is the Prince of Peace, meeting argument with argument, misjudgment with patience and all our difficulties and dangers with prayer.” Alcoholism became the movement’s primary target as excessive drinking reached crisis proportions in the years following the Civil War. After her conversion and baptism at twenty, Frances asked God what could be done to make the world a wider place of service for women. She was elected WCTU president in 1879, a post she held until her death seventeen years later. She helped transform this fledging grassroots movement into the largest women’s organization in the world, a remarkable achievement in a day when women in America could not vote, own property, or control their wages. Make no mistake: her activism was fueled by prayer. “I intend to become a Christian,” she wrote in her journal on October 23, 1859, and followed it with the prayer: