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Frances Willard

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839-1898) was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women suffragist.

Willard was elected president of United States Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1879, a position which she held for life. She created the Formed Worldwide W.C.T.U. in 1883, and was elected its president in 1888.

She founded the magazine The Union Signal, and was its editor from 1892 through 1898.

Her tireless efforts for women's suffrage and prohibition included a fifty-day speaking tour in 1874, averaging 30,000 miles of travel a year, and four hundred lectures a year for a ten year period. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (Women Suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution.

She wrote Woman and Temperance, Nineteen Beautiful Years, A Great Mother, Glimpses of Fifty Years, and a large number of magazine articles.