Frances Willard was an educator and a dean of the Women’s College of Northwestern University. She became president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879 and served in that position until her death in 1898. Willard wrote a history of the WCTU that included reflections on how she became an advocate for both prohibition and women’s suffrage at an early age.

Longer ago than I shall tell, my father returned one night to the far-off Wisconsin home where I was reared; and, sitting by my mother’s chair, with a child’s attentive ear, I listened to their words. He told us of the news that day [that] had brought about Neal Dow [mayor of Portland, Maine, who sponsored Maine’s prohibition law] and the great fight for prohibition down in Maine, and then he said: “I wonder if poor, rum-cursed Wisconsin will ever get a law like that?” And mother rocked a while in silence in the dear old chair I love, and then she gently said: “Yes, Josiah, there’ll be such a law all over the land some day, when women vote.”

My father had never heard her say so much before. He was a great conservative; so he looked tremendously astonished, and replied, in his keen, sarcastic voice: “And pray how will you arrange it so that women shall vote?” Mother’s chair went to and fro a little faster for a minute, and then, not looking into his face, but into the flickering flames of the grate, she slowly answered: “Well, I say to you, as the apostle Paul said to his jailor, ‘You have put us into prison, we being Romans, and you must come and take us out.’”

That was a seed-thought in a girl’s brain and heart. Years passed on, in which nothing more was said upon this dangerous theme. My brother grew to manhood, and soon after he was twenty-one years old he went with his father to vote. Standing by the window, a girl of sixteen years, a girl of simple, homely fancies, not at all strong-minded, and altogether ignorant of the world, I looked out as they drove away, my father and my brother, and as I looked I felt a strange ache in my heart, and tears sprang to my eyes. Turning to my sister Mary, who stood beside me, I saw that the dear little innocent seemed wonderfully sober, too. I said: “Don’t you wish we could go with them when we are old enough? Don’t we love our country just as well as they do?” and her little frightened voice piped out: “Yes, of course we ought. Don’t I know that? but you mustn’t tell a soul—not mother, even; we should be called strong-minded.”

In all the years since then I have kept these things, and many others like them, and pondered them in my heart; but two years of struggle in this temperance reform have shown me, as they have ten thousand other women, so clearly and so impressively, my duty, that I have passed the Rubicon [a limiting boundary] of silence, and am ready for any battle that shall be involved in this honest declaration of faith that is within me. . . .

I thought that women ought to have the ballot as I paid the hard-earned taxes upon my mother’s cottage home—but I never said as much—somehow the motive did not command my heart. For my own sake, I had not the courage, but I have for thy sake, dear native land, for thy necessity is as much greater than mine as thy transcendent hope is greater than the personal interest of thy humble child. . . .

Ah, it is women who have given the costliest hostages to fortune. Out into the battle of life they have sent their best beloved, with fearful odds against them, with snares that men have legalized and set for them on every hand. Beyond the arms that held them long, their boys have gone forever. Oh! by the danger they have dared; by the hours of patient watching over beds where helpless children lay; by the incense of ten thousand prayers wafted from their gentle lips to Heaven, I charge you give them power to protect, along life’s treacherous highway, those whom they have so loved. Let it no longer be that they must sit back among the shadows, hopelessly mourning over their strong staff broken, and their beautiful rod; but when the sons they love shall go forth to life’s battle, still let their mothers walk beside them, sweet and serious, and clad in the garments of power.

Source: Frances Willard, Women and Temperance; or, The Work and Workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1884), 457–59.