Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (September 28, 1839 – February 17, 1898) was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist.

Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth (on Prohibition) and Nineteenth (on women's suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted.

Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education.

She also advocated for prison reform, scientific temperance instruction, Christian socialism, and the global expansion of women's rights.

However, that position was to be short-lived with her resignation in 1874 after confrontations with the University President, Charles Henry Fowler, over her governance of the Woman's College.

In 1874, Willard participated in the founding convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) where she was elected the first Corresponding Secretary.

[13] As president of the WCTU, Willard also argued for female suffrage, based on "Home Protection," which she described as "the movement … the object of which is to secure for all women above the age of twenty-one years the ballot as one means for the protection of their homes from the devastation caused by the legalized traffic in strong drink.

[15] The "Home Protection" argument was used to garner the support of the "average woman," who was told to be suspicious of female suffragists by the patriarchal press, religious authorities, and society as a whole.

Willard insisted that women must forgo the notions that they were the "weaker" sex and that they must embrace their natural dependence on men.

"[17] The goal of the suffrage movement for Willard was to construct an "ideal of womanhood" that allowed women to fulfill their potential as the companions and counselors of men, as opposed to the "incumbrance and toy of man.

She claimed that natural and divine laws called for equality in the American household, with the mother and father sharing leadership.

[18] She collaborated closely with Lady Isabel Somerset, president of the British Women's Temperance Association, whom she visited several times in the United Kingdom.

[19] The convention was brought a set of principles that was drafted in Chicago, Illinois, by her and twenty-eight of the United States' leading reformers, whom had assembled at her invitation.

[20] In 1898, Willard died quietly in her sleep[21] at the Empire Hotel in New York City after contracting influenza while she was preparing to set sail for England and France.

The image succinctly portrayed one argument for female enfranchisement: without the right to vote, the educated, respectable woman was equated with the other outcasts of society to whom the franchise was denied.

[24] After her death, Willard was the first woman included among America's greatest leaders in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.

The plaque commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Willard's election as president of the WCTU on October 31, 1879: "In honor of one who made the world wider for women and more homelike for humanity Frances Elizabeth Willard Intrepid Pathfinder and beloved leader of the National and World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union."

Willard appears as one of two main female protagonists in the young adult novel Bicycle Madness by Jane Kurtz.

In these days when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of 'two hearts in counsel,' both of which are feminine.– Frances Willard, The Autobiography of an American Woman: Glimpses of Fifty Years, 1889Contemporary accounts described Willard's friendships and her pattern of long-term domestic assistance from women.

[44] It is difficult to redefine Willard's 19th-century life in terms of the culture and norms of later centuries, but some scholars describe her inclinations and actions as aligned with same-sex emotional alliance (what historian Judith M. Bennett calls "lesbian-like").

She recounted a time when Willard had visited the South and blamed the failure of the temperance movement there on the population: "The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt," and "the grog shop is its center of power....

[54] In her pamphlets Southern Horrors and The Red Record, Wells linked rhetoric portraying white women as symbols of innocence and purity that black men could not resist, as facilitating lynchings.

Under Willard's presidency, the national WCTU maintained a policy of "states rights" which allowed southern charters to be more conservative than their northern counterparts regarding questions of race and the role of women in politics.