All young Americans will enjoy this story of a little pioneer girl whose intelligence and determination later made her world-famous, and whose gaiety and charm made the whole world love her.
PIONEER GIRL begins with the covered-wagon trip of the Willard family from Ohio to Wisconsin, and gives an authentic picture of the life of tomboyish Frances and her sedate little sister at their farm on the beautiful Rock River.
"One of the few biographies simple enough for younger children to read . . . a gay and cheerful little book."—Parents' Magazine.
"The seriousness of Frances Willard shows itself here in a way that makes for lively reading; her restless drive to do something, go somewhere that seems to her worth while." — New York Herald-Tribune.
"The author sets out to tell only of the prairie years and does it well, but Frances Willard's early eagerness for education had such remarkable results that one hates to leave her at the age of eighteen." —The New Yorker.
Frances Willard, who has been called America's greatest woman, was born in Churchville, New York, near Rochester, September 28, 1839. Soon afterwards her family moved west to Oberlin, Ohio, and then to Wisconsin, near Janesville, the scene of PIONEER GIRL. Frances Willard lived to become world-famous. She won degrees from Northwestern, Syracuse, and Ohio Wesleyan, studied abroad, taught in country schools and universities, and was the first woman college president to confer degrees. She was an early and tireless advocate of women's suffrage, the eight-hour day, courts of arbitration, temperance, and other liberal and humanitarian causes. She was the first president of the National Council of Women, founder of the World W. C. T. U., a charter member of the D.A.R., a leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Hundreds of memorials have been named in her honor, schools, hospitals, settlement houses, churches, buildings, halls. And she is the only woman honored with a statue in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.
—From the dust jacket
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