Do Everything

With prodigious research and compelling prose, Christopher Evans brings to life one of the most consequential activists in the final decades of the nineteenth century. During this age of the New Woman and the Social Gospel, Frances Willard combined her temperance work with suffrage to unleash a formidable social reform movement. This superb and comprehensive biography should restore Willard to her rightful place as one of the most influential religious leaders in American history. * Randall Balmer, John Phillips Professor in Religion, Dartmouth College *
Chris Evans's richly detailed, page-turning account of the 'do everything' woman corrects a huge historical oversight. Smart, courageous, and charismatic, Willard was one of the most celebrated Americans of her time-and yet, surprisingly, she is barely known today. Evans ably demonstrates the importance of this remarkable religious thinker and canny organizer, who led a generation of women out of kitchens and parlors into forceful public activism. * Margaret Bendroth, historian of American religion and former director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston *
During an era in which women were barred from formal leadership in church and state alike, Frances Willard was a giant in the American public square. In this definitive biography, Evans reveals how Willard became one of the Gilded Age's most formidable reformers, defying and transforming expectations of the good Christian woman along the way. Underscoring both the breathtaking ambition and profound limitations of Willard's moral vision, Evans recovers a too-often forgotten past * one that matters for our future.Heath W. Carter, author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago *
Evans emphasizes Willard's turn to larger social reform issues such as the labor movement and Christian socialism. She wanted the WCTU to "do everything" and left behind those committed solely to prohibition. She also espoused the white Anglo-Saxon superiority that sustained racism and fostered hostility to immigrants. In time, she grew suspicious of those challenging her authority. When she developed a close and perhaps intimate friendship with the English prohibition advocate Isobel Somerset and spent more time in England, her base of support dwindled. She could not "do everything." Of interest to students and scholars of American religion, women's history, and social reform, this is now the standard biography of Willard. * C. H. Lippy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Choice Connect *
With Do Everything, Christopher H. Evans has provided scholars and the general public alike with an engaging, highly readable, and often quite moving portrait of arguably the most famous American woman of the Victorian age. * Gwion Jones, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society *
Do Everything is a masterful explication of a single life which, even long after ceasing to be a household name, continues to cast a massive shadow. * Zachariah S. Motts, The Asbury Journal 78/1 *
One of the strengths of the book is the author's sensitivity to regional differences. Passionately committed to building a strong national constituency around what she referred to as a "trinity" of social causes (prohibition, women's rights and suffrage, and workers' rights) Willard faced serious hurdles in the South and Northeast. Always strongest in the Midwest and the West, the WCTU's attempt to link the fate of temperance with women's suffrage labor rights was resisted by both Democratic and Republican partisans. * William Kostlevy, Middle West Review *