Frances Willard House tours reveal suffragist history at 1730 Chicago Ave. – Evanston RoundTable

If you move by 1730 Chicago Ave., you may discover one other small Victorian cottage with a “sweet little garden” and “tchotchkes on the shelves,” mentioned Lori Osborne, Museum Director of the Frances Willard House. But the home’s quiet look could also be deceiving – from the early 19th century into the 20th, the constructing doubled as a busy ladies’s workspace, housing the headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union – the most important group of ladies on the planet as of 1890.

Frances Willard, whose household constructed the home, served because the second president of the WCTU in 1879, solely 5 years after its founding. She lived in the home together with her mom. 

Osborne mentioned that Willard rose to management as a result of her imaginative and prescient was broad: “She’s like: We’re not just about temperance, we’re about women’s rights. We’re about all the problems that cause people to drink. … When you have poverty, when you have terrible working conditions, when you have all these issues forcing your quality of life down, what do [men] do? They head to the saloon.”

Aug. 26 is Women’s Equality Day – the 19th Amendment, which assured ladies’s proper to vote, was licensed on this date 102 years in the past. In honor of Willard’s work, the Frances Willard House Museum scheduled particular suffrage-themed home tours on Thursday, Aug. 25 and Sunday, Aug. 28.

Almost the whole lot in the home stays because it was when Willard died in 1898. On Thursday afternoon’s 1 p.m. tour, the museum director painted a vivid picture of what the home was like earlier than it was transformed right into a museum in 1900. 

Francis Willard and her sister Mary moved to Evanston to attend a small ladies’s faculty in 1858, and her mother and father, Josiah Willard and Mary Thompson, adopted behind. The household was Methodist, and a Methodist college (Northwestern) is simply up the street. Not solely that, Osborne added, however the household additionally was within the reform actions associated to temperance and girls’s rights that started in Evanston.

Inside one of many first-ground communal rooms is a group of furnishings that doesn’t match precisely as a result of the household didn’t have some huge cash once they got here – however there’s additionally a library. “Books are very expensive at the time. And they’re among the most important possessions they have,” Osborne mentioned. 

After the women graduate from faculty, Frances’ sister, Mary, dies. A couple of years later, the household builds its second Evanston house at 1730 Chicago on land they leased from Northwestern. After two years within the new house, Willard’s father succumbs to sickness as effectively. For the true lifespan of the home, from 1865 to 1898, the home belongs to Willard and her mom, who reside collectively.