page_title: Jennie Fowler Willing
section_title: Social reformer
hierarchical_section_title: Jennie Fowler Willing / Career / Social reformer
caption_attribution_description: English: Jennie Fowler Willing
context_page_description: Jennie Fowler Willing was a Canadian-born American educator, author, preacher, social reformer, and suffragist.
  She was a professor of English and a leader in the temperance movement. Willing wrote several books including From Fifteen to Twenty-five: A Book for Young Men and serials for newspapers. She married a lawyer and Methodist pastor at age 19. In 1873, she and her husband became professors at Illinois Wesleyan University.
  Willing came to notice when she joined the Illinois Woman's State Temperance Union, serving as its leader for some years. She and Emily Huntington Miller were involved with creating and presiding over the Cleveland convention of 1874 where the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was formed. She served as the editor of the national organization's journal for a period. In 1895, she created the New York Evangelistic Training School.
context_section_description: Her inherited love of reform brought her to the fore when the crusade swept over the United States. For several years, she was president of the Illinois Woman's State Temperance Union. With Miller, she issued the call for the Cleveland convention, and she presided over that body, in which the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (NWCTU) was organized. She was the first editor of the NWCTU's organ, later titled the Union Signal. Willing was drawn into public speaking by her temperance zeal, and soon she found herself addressing immense audiences in all the large cities of the U.S.. As one of the corresponding secretaries of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, she presented the temperance claims at conferences of ministers, and in scores of large towns in different parts of the U.S., interesting thousands of people in its work. Her other roles included superintendent of the NWCTU's Evangelistic Training Department, and president of the Frances Willard WCTU.
  For several years, she  rendered similar service to the Woman's Home Missionary Society. As an evangelist, she held many large and important revival services, and with marked success. After her removal to New York City, in 1889, she was busy with her home mission work, her evangelistic services, her Italian mission and the bureau for immigrants, with its immigrant girls' home, in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. She was a women's suffrage leader in Illinois.
caption: Jennie Fowler Willing
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