Women Revealed: Researching the lives of women: The Frances Willard Papers & WCTU resources

What Biographical Resources Does the WCTU Archives Hold? 

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, grew to become an international organization promoting a variety of social reforms in addition to temperance—including woman suffrage. One of the WCTU’s goals was to empower women to take leadership roles in their communities.  By the 1890s, the WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the US; it continued to attract a large membership through the Prohibition years, and into the 1970s.  The result for researchers is a set of remarkably granular demographic and biographic resources about women from the late 19^th to mid-20^th century. 

The Frances Willard Papers: correspondence, documents, 80 scrapbooks, 50 journal volumes, publications, speeches, photographs (follow link to finding aid) 

*=available in digital format        **=microfilm, available through ILL 

• Note: Willard’s correspondence files are in the process of being indexed; contact the Archives for more details 
• Records and serial publications of the World’s, National, state, and local WCTUs 
  • National and state-level annual reports 
  • A complete run (1883-2016) of the Union Signal, the WCTU’s national newspaper, published weekly until the 1950s 
  • Indexes to the Union Signal and national meeting minutes (the only existing set of indexes, very thorough in their listings of names)   
• Biographical files  
• Photographs of individuals, groups, and events in WCTU history 
• Dissertations and theses, many based on research in the Archives 
• Encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries (available online through HathiTrust or Internet Archive): 
  • *Woman and Temperance, or, The Work and Workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing Company, 1883. Biographical sketches of women working for temperance;  
  • *A Woman of the Century, Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds. Buffalo, NY: C.W. Moulton, 1893. Over 1400 biographical sketches of 19^th-century American women in all walks of life. 
  • *Thumb-nail Sketches of White Ribbon Women. Clara Christiana Chapin, Chicago, Woman's Temperance Publishing Association, 1895, several hundred brief biographies of national and international WCTU leaders 
• ** Temperance and Prohibition Papers Project (microfilm) a joint microfilm publication of the Ohio Historical Society, the Michigan Historical Collections, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, sponsored by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Columbus: Microfilmed by the Ohio Historical Society, 1977. Series 3 (WCTU Records, including National Meeting Minutes 1874-1993 and Willard correspondence and clippings scrapbooks) and Series 21 (Union Signal newspaper, 1883-1933) (available on site at the WCTU Archives; also held by numerous academic & research libraries in the US and available through ILL; contact the WCTU Archives for more details & reel-by-reel list of contents).