From outside the Frances Willard House Museum, at 1730 Chicago Avenue in Evanston, the Victorian exterior makes it easy to imagine refined family life and elegant celebrations.
But Director of Museum Operations and Communications Fiona Maxwell says the house was a workplace filled with objects of women’s work.
On a Sunday afternoon tour, one finds rooms filled with typewriters, Dictaphones, desks, pamphlets and petitions, letters and speeches — all objects central to Willard’s daily life and work.
“Frances Willard was a visionary feminist, social justice advocate and political activist during the late 1800’s, renowned as president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and for her work on women’s suffrage and on a host of progressive era reform issues advocating for women and children,” Maxwell said.
Each September, the Frances Willard House Museum marks Frances Willard’s birthday, Sept. 28, with special programs and tours that examine her model of leadership. In honor of the 150th anniversary of Willard’s inaugural term as the first Dean of Women at Northwestern University in 1873, the museum plans to explore her role in the field of women’s higher education.
Maxwell says Willard called her policy “do everything” because that was how she understood activism. She believed it was better not to focus on one narrow issue because problems were interconnected.
“Willard employed a philosophy that you had to try everything, employ all strategies in order to get results,” Maxwell said. “Write petitions, give speeches, organize local unions — the solutions she felt, were multifaceted.”
In addition to in-person tours and programming, the museum has become an online resource for women’s history providing educational resources through digital exhibits, libraries, archives, regular blog posts and posts to its YouTube Channel throughout the year.
“We don’t really celebrate Willard’s birthday in the traditional sense of ‘celebrating,'” said the museum’s Director Lori Osborne. “But each year we take this time to look back at her life and reflect on her leadership and her work for women’s empowerment and women’s rights.”
On Sunday, Sept. 24 at 4 p.m., the museum will host a virtual account of Willard’s first term as Dean of Women at Northwestern, where she broke new ground as a woman professor teaching female and male students in the same classroom, along with special tours of the museum on Sept. 21 and 28 at 1 p.m., 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.
“As is true for any of us, Willard was a complicated person but her impact and influence was remarkable, so, her birthday is cause for highlighting this in a world that has mostly forgotten her,” Osborne said.
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Gina Grillo is a freelance reporter with Pioneer Press.