Frances Willard House Museum & Archives
Frances Willard; visionary feminist, political activist & social justice reformer
“A Century of Remembering: The Great War” is the theme of Illinois Archives Month (October) 2017. World War I affected every aspect of American society, and is documented in many different ways in archival repositories across the state. The Frances Willard Memorial Library and Archives offers this brief overview of the role played by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. […]
By Chad Comello Digging through history is a lot like digging through dirt: it’s gonna get messy, but you’ll find some interesting stuff along the way. What is now the archives was once known as the Administration Building, built in 1922 to serve as the WCTU’s bustling headquarters. Now primarily a repository for organizational records, […]
Coloring books for adults do seem to be a thing. They are touted as being beneficial for relaxation, mindfulness, creativity, and even just fun. Realizing that museums and libraries are a hidden source of wonderful, colorable designs, the New York Academy of Medicine Library has launched the second annual #ColorOurCollections week on social media, inviting museums, […]
Great minds think alike, it’s said, and that statement was well illustrated last week in the Willard Archives, when faculty members from three different institutions of higher learning descended on the Archives at the same time. The three professors were doing end-of-summer research on very different projects, but, as is so often the case in […]
Time was when this statement meant that the speaker was a recovering alcoholic making a triumphal return from Dwight, Illinois, after undergoing the famous “Keeley Gold Cure” in that small but bustling town. For me, it means I’m back from a conference of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society (ADHS), held in Dwight from July […]
Independence Day in Evanston in 1871 was marked by parades, bands, fireworks, a baseball game, and many speeches. Not an unusual way to celebrate the 4th—except that these activities were organized by local women and were a fundraising event for the nascent Evanston College for Ladies—with the highlight of the day being the placement of the […]
In late April, 2016, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington D.C. hosted a conference entitled Forging Bonds Across Borders: Mobilizing for Women’s Rights and Social Justice in the 19th Century Transatlantic World. Co-sponsored by the University of Maryland at College Park and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, the conference brought scholars from around […]
I first encountered Frances Willard in 2014 when I stumbled upon her 1895 book, A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. I was captivated by her use of metaphor and the role she granted the bicycle in her progressive vision, and she inadvertently shaped the direction of my dissertation research […]
The Frances Willard Memorial Library and Archives was happy to welcome Professor Rui Kohiyama to our Reading Room earlier this month. Professor Kohiyama teaches American and Gender Studies at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, and has done much research on missionaries and the WCTU in Japan. She has been in email contact with the Archives for […]
When we work in an archive, it is easy to feel like we are treading on hallowed ground—constantly solemn, serious, and afraid to take anything for granted. But during a recent research trip to the Willard Archives, I discovered a surprisingly bizarre, and hilarious, object. This photograph, pasted into the teenage Mary Willard’s unpublished diary […]