WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION

WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU) was dedicated to eliminating the consumption of alcohol. Founded in 1874, the WCTU was the largest women's reform organization of the nineteenth century. It had its origin in the 1873 Woman's Temperance Crusade, in which women across the country engaged in spontaneous protest, marching to saloons, singing hymns, praying, dumping liquor barrels, destroying property, and forcing liquor sellers to close their businesses. When closed saloons reopened several months later, temperance women decided to organize formally, calling for a national convention to be held in Cleveland 18–20 November 1874. Delegates from seventeen states attended, and the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was founded with Annie Wittenmyer as president(1873–1878). Its membership, composed mainly of evangelical Protestants and limited to women, grew rapidly, and soon every state had a WCTU organization.

During its first five years, the organization focused on abstinence through moral suasion and education, but its activities broadened to include many women's rights reforms when Frances Willard became president in 1879. Willard was the organization's most famous and innovative leader (1879–1898). Guided by Willard's "Do Everything" motto, the organization embraced the moral reform of prostitutes, prison reform, and woman suffrage. Willard's "Home Protection" campaign argued that with the vote women could enact prohibition, and this became a major focus of the organization's efforts, particularly under its third president (1898–1914), Lillian M. Stevens, a Willard protege. The WTCU developed sophisticated political organizing and lobbying techniques at local, state, and national levels and also ran a large publishing company. In the 1880s it became an international organization working for prohibition and women's rights around the world. The WCTU was also the first large national organization to unite Northern and Southern women after the Civil War, and it included black women, although local chapters in both the North and South were usually segregated.

A powerful and influential reform group, the WCTU secured a number of political victories. It campaigned, for example, for state legislation requiring scientific temperance instruction in the public schools, which was accomplished by 1902. Its most well known accomplishment, however, was the passage of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) Amendment in 1919. After 1919, guided by its fourth president (1914–1925), Anna Gordon, the organization turned its attention to child welfare, social purity, and the "Americanization" of immigrants. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, it also fought the repeal of Prohibition, a battle which it lost in 1933 and which left the WCTU considerably weakened.

In the early twenty-first century, the WCTU was still headquartered in Evanston, Ill., as it had been since Willard headed the organization. The emblem of the WCTU is a white ribbon bow with the motto "For God and Home and Every land." In 1975 it had organizations in more than seventy nations and approximately 250,000 members in the United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordin, Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

———. Frances Willard: A Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Hays, Agnes Dubbs. Heritage of Dedication: One Hundred Years of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1974. Evanston, Ill.: Signal Press, 1973.

Tyrrell, Ian R. Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1800– 1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Willard, Frances E. Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman. Chicago: Woman's Temperance Publication Association, 1889.

Edith KirkendallStanley/l. t.

See alsoSettlement House Movement ; Suffrage: Woman's Suffrage ; Temperance Movement ; Women's Rights Movement .

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

Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), organization that seeks to upgrade moral life, especially through abstinence from alcohol. The National WCTU of the United States was founded (1874) in Cleveland, Ohio, as a result of the Woman's Temperance Crusade that spread through the Midwest at that time. Frances Willard , the group's second president (1879-98), was responsible for the organization (1883) of the World WCTU, which now has branches in approximately 70 countries. The organization has worked for public education against the use of alcohol and for legislation to prohibit its sale. It has also supported research and education concerning tobacco, narcotics, and other potentially dangerous drugs. As of 1992, the National WCTU had 50,000 members. Its official organ is the weekly Union Signal.