Frances Willard and the Feminism of Fear

Abstract

tury. She was able to attract and keep members in the WCTU, and her crowning achievement was the transformation of a national, mass base of these women from full political exclusion to active participation as a powerful organized interest. Although Willarda creature of her time-made middle-class white women her primary audience, she was one of the few reformers who employed special efforts to mobilize Black women and children. The size of WCTU membership, compared with other women's organizations of the period, demonstrated Willard's ability to attract members to the WCTU and keep them. Late nineteenth-century women opted for Willard's temperance reform over suffrage or alternative membership organizations. According to Ruth Bordin, there were 150,000 dues-paying adult members in the WCTU in 1890 compared with 13,000 in the National American Woman Suffrage Association.1 Including membership in its juvenile societies, the WCTU grew under Willard's leadership in the 1880s from 27,000 to nearly 200,000 members.2 Although Willard's massive political mobilization of women has been acknowledged, there has not yet been an adequate explanation of how she succeeded.3 Political mobilization is the process of activating formerly passive or excluded individuals so that they will participate for an extended period of time in a form of collective action-usually a political organization-that aims to create change.4 Successful political mobilization tends to depend upon a reform leader's design of arguments and rhetoric-usually termed political ideology-that persuade audiences to follow the