Wheel Within a Wheel, A.
Willard, Frances E. A Wheel Within a Wheel. How I learned to ride the bicycle. Illustrated. New York, Chicago, Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, 1895.
16mo.; illustrated with black and white portrait frontispiece and six other photographs and drawings; orange cloth, pictorially stamped in silver and green with several wheels; light wear.
First edition. By 1895, Willard had been elected President of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union which represented a membership of nearly two million. Throughout her leadership of the WCTU she had espoused a “do everything” policy, encouraging women to a more active life. In 1895 she published a handbook, Do Everything, as well as A Wheel Within a Wheel. At the age of 53, as a wild enthusiasm for bicycle-riding swept the country, she herself learned to ride under the tutelage of Lady Henry Somerset, the British Temperance leader who had become a good friend and constant companion. The account is laced with reflections on how women may acquire new skills, a broader outlook, and the ability to propel themselves in any direction they choose.
Frances Willard (1839-1898) began her career as a devoted educator and Methodist. In 1864 she published her first book, Nineteen Beautiful Years, a biography of her sister Mary who had fallen victim to tuberculosis. In 1868 she traveled throughout Europe for two years with a wealthy friend, immersing herself in lectures, languages, and the arts in Berlin, Paris, and Rome, and supported these interests by writing weekly articles for local papers at home in Evanston, Illinois. Soon after her return she became president of the Evanston College for Ladies. When the Ladies College was absorbed into Northwestern in 1873, Willard found a new outlet for her desire to forward the cause of female equality, which had been earlier inflamed by John Stuart Mill’s “The Enfranchisement of Women” and the writings and lectures of Margaret Fuller and Anna Dickinson.
Willard helped to found the Association for the Advancement of Women in New York, becoming vice president, and was corresponding secretary of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), but by 1877 had resigned from both posts so that she could devote more time to a wider range of issues, especially suffrage. After a year of lecturing all over the United States on “women and service,” as president of the Illinois WCTU she spearheaded the “Home Protection” petition which ostensibly sought the right for women to vote on temperance issues, but also, by casting the issues in familiar terms, effectively enticed women into taking an active interest in shaping the political climate. Though Home Protection failed, it inspired similar attempts in other states.
In 1876 Willard began a three-year stint as the head of the publications committee of the national WCTU, using their journal, Our Union, as a platform to expand their views, a task she was better equipped for in 1879 when she was elected president of the national union, a position she held until her death twenty years later. Though her later, more direct attempts to bring women into politics were somewhat divisive —especially her organization of the “Home Protection” party and the Prohibition-Home Protection party—as president of the WCTU she lectured continually nationwide, and was able to bring the union to the South in 1881 and to the West in 1883.
Frances Willard thought of the WCTU as a school to interest women in life beyond the family circle, so that they might take a more active and useful part in society. To encourage the timid, she tied the home to her cause and to her organization. The famous slogan “For God and Home and Native Land,” which she had first devised for the Chicago union, was adopted by the national WCTU in 1876. The organization’s badge, chosen the next year, was a bow of white ribbon symbolizing the purity of the home, and “Home Protection” was always to be the Union’s rallying cry.
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