Do Everything

Reviews / Votes

With prodigious research and compelling prose, Christopher Evans brings to life one of the most consequential activists in the final decades of the nineteenth century. During this age of the New Woman and the Social Gospel, Frances Willard combined her temperance work with suffrage to unleash a formidable social reform movement. This superb and comprehensive biography should restore Willard to her rightful place as one of the most influential religious leaders in American history. * Randall Balmer, John Phillips Professor in Religion, Dartmouth College * Chris Evans's richly detailed, page-turning account of the 'do everything' woman corrects a huge historical oversight. Smart, courageous, and charismatic, Willard was one of the most celebrated Americans of her time-and yet, surprisingly, she is barely known today. Evans ably demonstrates the importance of this remarkable religious thinker and canny organizer, who led a generation of women out of kitchens and parlors into forceful public activism. * Margaret Bendroth, historian of American religion and former director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston * During an era in which women were barred from formal leadership in church and state alike, Frances Willard was a giant in the American public square. In this definitive biography, Evans reveals how Willard became one of the Gilded Age's most formidable reformers, defying and transforming expectations of the good Christian woman along the way. Underscoring both the breathtaking ambition and profound limitations of Willard's moral vision, Evans recovers a too-often forgotten past * one that matters for our future.Heath W. Carter, author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago * Evans emphasizes Willard's turn to larger social reform issues such as the labor movement and Christian socialism. She wanted the WCTU to "do everything" and left behind those committed solely to prohibition. She also espoused the white Anglo-Saxon superiority that sustained racism and fostered hostility to immigrants. In time, she grew suspicious of those challenging her authority. When she developed a close and perhaps intimate friendship with the English prohibition advocate Isobel Somerset and spent more time in England, her base of support dwindled. She could not "do everything." Of interest to students and scholars of American religion, women's history, and social reform, this is now the standard biography of Willard. * C. H. Lippy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Choice Connect * With Do Everything, Christopher H. Evans has provided scholars and the general public alike with an engaging, highly readable, and often quite moving portrait of arguably the most famous American woman of the Victorian age. * Gwion Jones, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society * Do Everything is a masterful explication of a single life which, even long after ceasing to be a household name, continues to cast a massive shadow. * Zachariah S. Motts, The Asbury Journal 78/1 * One of the strengths of the book is the author's sensitivity to regional differences. Passionately committed to building a strong national constituency around what she referred to as a "trinity" of social causes (prohibition, women's rights and suffrage, and workers' rights) Willard faced serious hurdles in the South and Northeast. Always strongest in the Midwest and the West, the WCTU's attempt to link the fate of temperance with women's suffrage labor rights was resisted by both Democratic and Republican partisans. * William Kostlevy, Middle West Review * The biography demonstrates that rights and privileges enjoyed in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries were not easily won and should not be taken for granted. At the same time, in hindsight, later generations should benefit from better understanding of cultural blind spots, such as deeply embedded theories of race, class, and gender; and philosophies of history that rise and fall in popularity from generation to generation. * Wendy J. Deichmann, Journal of Presbyterian History * Do Everything provides pivotal intersections with a range of nineteenth-century issues to such an extent that the book could be read not only as Willard's biography but also as a deep dive into the era through its most prominent issues, such as prohibition, racism, sexism, human sexuality, women's roles in home, church, and society, and women's suffrage. This is not surprising given that via the WCTU's 'Do Everything' policy under Willard's nearly twenty-year presidency (1879-98), the organization provided women with their own institution for societal and ecclesial reform. * Priscilla Pope-Levison, Wesley and Methodist Studies * In Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard, Christopher H. Evans offers a stirring portrait of the American activist whose leadership elevated the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) into a national juggernaut that not only advanced the cause of a constitutional prohibition amendment, but also pushed for rights for women and workers. * Nicole Penn, Fides et Historia * C. H. Evans, professor of the History of Christianity and of Methodist studies at Boston university, is one of the main researchers of the Social Gospel Movement - similar to social Christianism but with different a cultural context. He provides a thorough and well documented study of the life, work and world of one of the best-known but little-studied women of the XIXth century, Frances Willard (1837-1898), Methodist, long-time head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). * David Bundy, Theological and Religious Studies * Evans's work breathes new life into the story of an important leader in nineteenthcentury U.S. history. * Thomas J. Lappas, Church History * Evans' scholarship is a product of careful archival research and empathetic historical reconstruction. It must be considered required reading for nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, religious or otherwise. Evans' detailed analysis will be of interest to the erudite historian and the interested public. * Allison Kach-Yawnghwe, Religious Studies Review * In this comprehensive biography, Evans successfully presents a profoundly influential (and complex) life that inspires a vision of optimistic, compassionate, social action based on a foundation of Evangelical holiness orthodoxy. Those researching mid-19th century feminism and American social action, especially in the Methodist tradition, will find this book of special interest. * Mark O. Wilson, Reading Religion *