Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The national Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in Cincinnati in 1874, emerged from a grassroots movement, the so‐called Woman's Crusade, against the consumption of alcoholic beverages.At first the organization focused on temperance, but under Frances
Willard, president from 1879 to her death in 1898, the agenda broadened to include a variety of causes, from peace and missions to kindergartens. Willard's “do‐everything” policy gave rise to a series of WCTU “departments” in line with the principle of bureaucratic specializations; state and local affiliates arose as well. The WCTU flourished in the
Middle West and Northeast but lagged in the
South. A campaign for “scientific temperance‐instruction” laws achieved great success. Becoming more radical after 1886, the WCTU advocated the eight‐hour work day and equal wages for men and women workers, and courted the
Knights of Labor and the
Populist party. A small minority became socialists, their beliefs deriving not from Marxism but from the
Social Gospel, which enjoyed broad support among temperance women. Willard and the WCTU also embraced the
woman suffrage movement, advocating votes for women as a means of protecting the home and strengthening family values.
From 1884 to 1889 the WCTU split over whether to endorse the Prohibition party and criticize
Republican party inaction, but the breakaway Non‐Partisan WCTU, which sided with the Republican party, never became a serious rival. Through the efforts of Willard and her lieutenants, the WCTU attracted 150,000 members by 1890. Aside from the
women's club movement, this made it the nation's largest and most significant women's organization. After 1883 WCTU missionaries spread the movement internationally. Within the United States, Matilda Carse's Woman's Temperance Publishing Association promoted the WCTU's arguments. The depression of the 1890s took its toll, however, and WCTU membership stagnated. Willard now faced criticism over her absences abroad and her friendship with Isabel Somerset, an English aristocrat and the World WCTU's vice president. Somerset's support of state‐regulated prostitution in the British Empire and her reputed hostility to prohibition added to the friction. After Willard's death, the WCTU returned to a more conservative stance but never fully abandoned the do‐everything policy.
After 1898 the Anti‐Saloon League, led by Protestant ministers, emerged as the leader of a resurgent and narrowly focused prohibition movement, but the WCTU provided grassroots back‐up. With ratification of the
Eighteenth Amendment (prohibition) in 1919 the WCTU's membership rose again, reaching over 300,000 in the 1920s under presidents Anna Gordon and Ella Boole, giving the organization considerable lobbying power for enforcement of the Volstead Act. Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 proved a terminal setback to national prohibition, but the WCTU, based in Evanston, Illinois, continued to defend state and local liquor laws and to campaign for social welfare and world peace.
See also
Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse;
Feminism;
Labor Movements;
Methodism;
Peace Movements;
Prostitution and Antiprostitution;
Temperance and Prohibition.
Bibliography
Ruth Bordin , Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900, 1980.
Ian Tyrrell , Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930, 1991.
Ian Tyrrell
