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Kelly Payne, Janel Simons

The Bicycle in the Service of Reform: Frances Willard's Social Entrepreneurship, Her 'Do Everything' Policy, and the Temperance Temple Campaign

This essay situates Frances Willard's temperance reform campaigns as entrepreneurial in nature, and claims Willard as a key nineteenth-century American social innovator. Much has been written on Willard's temperance policies and her leadership in the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement as well as her founding of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Organization. The writings Willard produced on women's access to and engagement with the bicycle as a reform technology has not been explored. In offering a narrative of the strategies and experiences Willard used to employ the bicycle as a tool or ally for temperance reform and woman's rights, this essay argues for the inclusion of women's voices in the public sphere and in publication around social and economic mobility. The bicycle offered Willard and her WCTU organization a key metonymic image--the wheel--around which to analyze the relationship of temperance to everyday lives. Willard's "Do Everything" campaign can be seen as the nineteenth-century equivalent of vast social entrepreneurship.

Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs

The American Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Primer

This introduction to the special issue on the American entrepreneurial spirit sketches its significance to American culture. The entrepreneur is an important cultural archetype that reflects the zeitgeist. Accordingly, fears, anxieties, desires, and wishes may be projected onto the entrepreneur; the figure of the entrepreneur—and interpretations of the entrepreneur as a hero or villain—is thus a cultural barometer that provides insight into the American psyche.