Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists by Baker Jean H

Author:Baker, Jean H. [Baker, Jean H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Finding the Way

In 1859 Frances graduated from college, and for the next nine years she pursued the only approved occupation for women. She taught school in mostly one-room classrooms in Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. Willard described these years as “thirteen separate seasons of teaching, eleven separate institutions, and six separate towns,” though she made clear that she had been invited back by all but one of the schools. It was her restless spirit that compelled her to move. Displaying singular organizational capacity, she also served as an administrator and head, what the nineteenth century called a preceptress or female principal, in several of these female academies. But the fires of ambition never quieted. “Stir yourself — be determined to write — books if you please, why not?” 15

For twenty-year-old Frances Willard the next nine years began a period of self-conscious, introspective searching for who she was, what she should be as a good Christian, and what she might become as an ambitious woman. She described herself as “not good looking, no sunny locks and a resolute expression … five-feet, two and a quarter inches and 95 lbs with freckles and a poor plain face.” Having earlier come to terms with her unremarkable features and her resolute, prominent Willard jaw, she was less perplexed by what she looked like and far more concerned with what she might do and become.16

Modern psychologists call this period in adolescent lives “an identity crisis,” and it is less obvious, or at least less often documented, among young women who find the resolution of their dilemmas in marriage and childbearing than among young men. Willard was different. In her early twenties, she faced three personal crises, which had to be settled before she could establish a career and follow the stars of her ambition. First she must undergo the requisite conversion experience expected of all Methodists. Then she must transcend the numbing grief and turmoil over her sister Mary’s death in 1862, her father’s death in 1868, and her brother’s deepening alcoholism. Finally, and perhaps most intensely agonizing, she must determine her sexuality and love interests at a time when she was engaged to Charles Fowler, a Methodist minister, but loved more Mary Bannister, the woman who became her brother’s wife. Only when these conflicts were decided did Frances Willard find the occupation that both served the Lord and satisfied her ambition “to be widely known, loved and believed in, the more widely the better.”17

During the spring of 1859 Frances Willard was honored as the valedictorian of her class at the North Western Female College. For the occasion she wrote a schoolgirlish address entitled “Horizons.” It was a paean to the hard work she held as one of her highest ideals and her aspirations to be somebody. She knew that her college diploma was not the final destination of learning that it was for most of her classmates. It represented only a beginning, as she wrote in her journal, “of the Beautiful Search after Truth & Right & Peace.

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