Historic Image of Frances Willard and her assistant Anna Gordon
The Willard house, built by Willard’s father and continually occupied by the WCTU, has been mostly restored and captures a sense of what life might have been like within it’s walls when Willard resided there, all abustle with fervent women researching, writing, planning and distributing information. Unusually, there are a number of photographs of the interior of the house in its heyday capturing life in action, so the translation from organizing hub to house museum and back again was not so difficult to imagine. The rooms are small and the light limited which pushed my creativity and technical skills as a photographer. After making initial survey images of the house I went home and examined the images, meditated on them, and conjured my own version of the activities that might have gone on within this hive and how they relate to present day organizing. I then mapped out what I envisioned for each room of the house, making costumes and props and calling on friends to become actors in vignettes. At each shoot I told a story of the characters in the vignette and the particulars of what they were doing and why. I asked each woman to imagine that they were existing as a woman of the past, present and future, a bridge anchored in history. Although they wore the clothing of the past, they bore the wisdom and insight of today.
Ramibi Circle.
In 1887 Pandita Ramibi, India’s first prominent feminist, came to the United States to spread the word and garner support for her work with child widows in India. After the birth of her daughter she resolved to spend her life attempting to better the status of women in India. She spoke out in support of female education and against the practice of child marriage and the resulting constraints of child widows. She founded a school/mission for widowed child brides which still exists today and serves a wider gamut of needy people including widows, orphans and the blind. In July of 1887 she met Willard over dinner inspiring Willard to organize Ramibi Circles in which individual members of the WCTU made a pledge to support Ramibi’s work by donating a dollar a year for a decade to support Ramibi’s work and school. The results of these efforts contributed to the empowerment and education of young Indian women toward self-sufficiency and socio-political participation.
This image depicts a dinner with Ramibi and Willard flanked by fellow members of the WCTU and a younger generation of girls, perhaps activists in training, girls being educated and empowered with the skills to advocate for themselves and others in the decades to come. On the table are documents old and new, including the books I am Malala and The Pink Sari Revolution, both current Indian female lead efforts aimed at educating and exacting justice for girls and women. This is a teachable moment, possibly their is a discussion of the sexual exploitation of girls and young women throughout history happening, a discussion of what these young girls can do to protect and advocate for other girls and women.
Historic Image of Rebecca Krikorian and Frances Elizabeth Willard.
A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution (See first image in this post)
Willard and her mother Mary were incredibly close and lived together in Rest Cottage until the end of Mary’s life. Mary was Frances’ earliest teacher and although Mary took classes at Oberlin College in Ohio, she did not complete a college degree. It is likely that Frances was inspired to pursue a life outside of domesticity after witnessing her mother’s life under the yoke of it. Willard attended North Western College for Ladies and later briefly became the dean of the Women’s College of Northwestern. After resigning from this post she focused her energies on the WCTU which she became President of in 1879 and remained so until her death in 1898. Using the WCTU platform to advocate for social change she averaged 400 lectures a year to audiences around the world. This image imagines that there are so many women of the past and present whose mother’s inspire their journey to pursue a life of greater impact. In Mary’s bedroom a woman embodying the spirit of the potential before her takes the possibility of a mother’s regrets and looks out toward a world of actions, imagines the possibilities of revolution, imagines how she might contribute to the world and what changes she might make to improve the lives of those to come. During the women march of 2017 I captured many images of women inspired to work toward change today, to fight with a dogged commitment for what they believe in. The A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution image in the window frame is one of them, turned diaphanous to transcend time.
Power to the Polls.
Power to the Polls depicts Frances Harper, an African-American abolitionist, suffragist, poet and author who was head of her local WCTU chapter in Philidelphia and Catherine Waugh McCullloh a lawyer, suffragist and member of the WCTU who was one of 100 female attorneys in the country in the 1890’s and would go on to become the first female Justice of the Peace in Illinois and first female presidential elector. Both women committed much of their lives to the cause of women’s suffrage and were instrumental in achieving the vote for women. This image imagines a moment of both confidence and power, where Harper and McCulloch are partnered in their pursuit of strategizing over the next steps in the fight to obtain the right for women to vote. The image is also a celebration and encouragement for us today to embrace our right and responsibility to vote, and speaks to the history of the power of voting. The present day Women’s March platform kicked off a Power to the Polls campaign in January 2018 to register voters, engage impacted communities and harness the collective energy to advocate for policies and candidates that reflect our values and the election of more women and progressive candidates to office. Similarly the women of the WCTU worked tirelessly to have their voices represented and to push congress toward more progressive legislation despite not initially having the vote. On the wall to the left of Harper is a map of the US in 1911 marking the states that had suffrage and those that were on the brink of suffrage. In 1913 Illinois gained suffrage for women and in 1920 women’s suffrage was officially adopted by the nation, although discrimination and denial of the right to vote persists in insidious ways even after the success of the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. Layered into the image as well is one of the posters Shepherd Fairey designed for the Women’s March of 2017 that has a tag line, not shown, We The People Protect Each Other. Underlying this image is an image from the August 26, 1970 Women’s Equality March where 50,000 people marched in the streets of New York city to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment. The many parts of this image are combined to create a historical narrative of the past reaching toward the future. (It is noteworthy to mention that the woman depicting Catherine Waugh McCulloch is actually her grand-daughter, so a very direct descendent from this particular moment in history and that national and international meeting of the WCTU were not segregated, but that local chapters of the WCTU often met in and through their churches and were segregated. Harper visited the national WCTU headquarters at Rest Cottage and would have met and worked with other black and white women who were in the house at the time.)
Historic image of women at work in the office where the Power to the Polls Image was made.
A Room of One's Own.
There are several archival images of Willard surrounded by libraries worth of books, stacked and shelved about her, papers in piles and photographs tacked around her work space. She was an avid reader, consumer of information, thinker and writer. This image imagines a young Frances in her bedroom in a quest for knowledge about the future. She is preparing for a lifetime committed to the labor of empowering women young and old across the boundaries of race, class and nationality. Reading text after text she has settled in with Together We Rise: The Women’s March Behind the Scenes At The Protest Heard Around The World, in order to gather wisdom about what is important to women of the future so that she might better shape her efforts. Perhaps she had a certain psychic clairvoyance that allowed her to borrow pre-release texts, a sort of free library with the future. Willard was known for reading late into the night and taking notes on her slate to inform her later writing.
Historic image of Willard at work in her office.
Willard & Wells.
Although Willard worked on many issues to transform the social fabric of her time, her politics around race were complicated. Her parents were abolitionists and provided safe-haven on the underground railroad while the family lived in Oberlin, OH and she ensured that the meetings of the national and international WCTU were integrated and worked closely with women of various races both nationally and internationally. But individual state local chapters of the WCTU were segregated. This is likely because meeting were often held in churches and other segregated gathering places and were thus segregated by the nature of where and why and how people gathered in that day. When Willard was at the height of her work around suffrage, she placed a certain emphasis on encouraging white WCTU chapters in the South to mobilize for the vote as white women of the WCTU from the South during that time were less inclined to organize for suffrage, thereby not placing an equal emphasis and value on the black southern chapters of the WCTU. There is also a chronicled historic tension between the journalist, educator and early civil rights advocate, Ida B Wells and Frances E Willard. Wells traveled the country and parts of Europe speaking out against the violence and prejudice against black people rampant in the US in the 1890s. She documented how lynching was used in the South as a way to control or punish black people rather than being based on criminal acts by black people, and lead the efforts in the Anti-Lynching Movement. Willard did not immediately speak out in support of the Anti-Lynching Movement and Wells called her out for failing to use her political sway as a voice of resistance in this movement, a case of silence perpetuating violence. Wells also pointed to an interview of Willard during her tour of the American South in which she had blamed black behavior for the defeat of temperance legislation. "The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt," she had said, and "the grog shop is its center of power.... The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities." Wells felt strongly that Willard's attitude inflamed the crimes against African Americans in the US and that as a woman with such great power she had a responsibility to speak out against the unfounded abuse of black americans.
Willard did later sign on in support of the Anti-Lynching Movement and in her 1894 Presidential Address to the WCTU stated:
It is inconceivable that the W.C.T.U. will ever condone lynching, no matter what the provocation, and no matter whether its barbarous spectacle is to be seen in the North or South, in home or foreign countries. Any people that defends itself by shooting, burning, or otherwise torturing and killing any human being, for no matter what offence, works a greater retribution upon itself by the blunting of moral perception and fine feeling than it can possibly work upon any poor debased wretch or monster that it thus torments into another world. Concerning the stirring up of the lynching question in Great Britain, I have thought that its reaction might have a wholesome tendency, and for this reason urge the following resolution, which was offered by Lady Henry Somerset at the last annual meeting of the British Woman's Temperance Association, and unanimously adopted, and which has been adopted by many of our State unions:
Resolved, That we are opposed to lynching as a method of punishment, no matter what the crime, and irrespective of the race by which the crime is committed, believing that every human being is entitled to be tried by a jury of his peers.
The interactions between Wells and Willard are a noteworthy and teachable moment. It seems that Willard, who harbored judgments about black men under the influence of alcohol, as she harbored judgements about all men under the influence of alcohol, was able to truly listen to and hear Wells' message about the barbarity of white lynch mob behavior. Through this controversy, she became an upstander, an individual who sees injustice and acts, no longer a bystander. The image I created in Willard's office is an effort to encompass this journey of transformation and active participation in a movement that was not one of Willard's initial causes. In this moment I imagine a conversation between Willard and Wells, although they are not known to have met in private in real life, only in limited public engagements. Wells is explaining her perspective to Willard, describing her observations of lynching in the American South, the grave impact on the moral and social fabric of our nation. Willard has listened deeply and felt the necessity of Wells anti-lynching movement. She is reflecting on her past comments and doing penance for her prior public words. By writing Black Lives Matter over and over and over again she is both absorbing the impact of her own previous slanderous actions and aligning herself with the movement. She is in a new found position of humility and advocacy for racial parity and justice. The scroll that Willard is composing is inspired by the Polyglot petitions that the WCTU is known for utilizing to gather signatures on a specific issue and then present before congress to demonstrate the number of supporters for a specific political issue they hope to change. In this image, Wells is both in a position of power, standing over Willard, but also one of offering advice and information. It is imagined that they are able to peel back the weight and emotion of the history of their interaction and allow themselves to be vulnerable and honest to work together toward change. By utilizing Black Lives Matter, a photo from the frontlines of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington and the Wells-Willard exchange we see the bridge of history of how deeply racism is institutionalized in the fabric of our nation and how much work we still have to do.
Historic Image of the Polyglot Petitions gathered by the WCTU.
Dear Sisters.
This image speaks to the long history of sexual abuse and collective efforts of women working to protect the mental and physical welfare of other women. In 1886 members of the WCTU began working to increase the age of consent. In most states at the time the age of consent was between seven and ten years old. In the following decades members of WCTU gathered fifteen thousand signatures on a polyglot petition on behalf of increasing the age of consent. Despite the signers not having the vote, they presented these signatures before congress and shortly most states increased the age of consent to between 14 and 18 years old. Today sexual predilections and violations are not so openly accepted, we have laws to protect our youngest, but there are no guarantees against sexual assault and it persists in families, on the street and in the work place. #Times Up is the legal arm that has grown out of the #MeToo movement to support the prosecutorial efforts of victims of sexual assault. In the founding days of this campaign there was a public exchange of letters that began Dear Sisters between the 700,00 members of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and the over one thousand member Hollywood based #TimesUp legal organization. In these letters a commitment to support and uplift the voices of victims of sex crimes across race, class and occupation was made. This image hopes to capture the lengthy history of diverse women working together to protect each other from sexual abuse. I have included the official portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her career efforts to protect the rights of women and work toward empowering the voices of the under recognized and underserved.
Historic Image of WCTU workers.
Futurist.
Willard is often pictured wearing a Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war, cameo pin. British suffragists wore her likeness on their cameo brooches as a sign of their commitment to the struggle and movement for suffrage. It was a dogwhistle of sorts, similar to the coded messages in Victorian flower arrangements like the tussie-mussie, more than a beautiful adornment it was a way for fellow suffragists to recognize one another. This image imagines a young woman of the 1890’s, perhaps a suffragist, looking toward an afro-futuristic strong woman for inspiration. She is looking to the future for strength rather than the past, gathering her courage from the women who have come before her, but grasping for the future on her unknown path, standing for all those who have been silenced, she wields the wisdom of Minerva but forges forward for what is to come. Perhaps others who wear the future woman symbol will recognize her as they pass, will join her on this road to societal transformation.
Historic portrait of Willard with Minerva cameo pin.
Thank you to Lisa D who had the intuition to connect me with the Willard House, to Lori Osborne the director of the Willard House for sharing her insight into Willard’s history and supporting my vision, and to the Evanston Arts Council for believing in the project enough to provide a funding grant.