Prohibition history
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
The WCTU, founded in Cleveland in 1874, was the largest women’s organisation in nineteenth-century America and the engine of the second temperance wave. Under Frances Willard it campaigned for prohibition, women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day and school reform at the same time, on the argument that they were one cause.
The Woman’s Crusade
It began in Hillsboro, Ohio in December 1873, when a group of women walked into saloons, knelt on the floor and prayed until the owner closed. It spread across the Midwest through that winter — hundreds of towns, thousands of women standing in the snow outside bars, singing hymns and recording names.
It was extraordinarily effective in the short term and almost entirely temporary. Saloons closed and reopened once the crowd moved on. What the Crusade did produce was a network of women who had discovered they could organise, and in November 1874 they convened in Cleveland and founded a permanent body.
Frances Willard and “Do Everything”
Willard became president in 1879 and ran the organisation until her death in 1898, by which point it had something in the region of 150,000 members and chapters in every state. Her policy was called Do Everything, and it was a deliberate rejection of single-issue discipline.
Under it the WCTU campaigned for the vote, for an eight-hour working day, for kindergartens, for prison reform, for the age of consent to be raised from statutory levels that were in some states as low as ten, for federal aid to education, and for world peace. The logic was that a woman who could not vote, could not own property and could not leave had no defence against a drinking husband except the law, and the law would not be changed by people who could not elect anybody.
Willard was also a socialist, a Methodist, a university dean and a committed cyclist who wrote a small book about learning to ride at fifty-three. She is the first woman commemorated in the National Statuary Hall collection in the Capitol.
Why the brewers funded anti-suffrage
Because the arithmetic was obvious to everybody. If women got the vote, the liquor trade expected to lose, and it acted accordingly: the United States Brewers’ Association and allied interests put money into campaigns against women’s suffrage in state after state, sometimes openly and more often not.
This did the suffrage movement real damage. It gave opponents a usable argument — a vote for suffrage is a vote for prohibition — and it split suffragists who had no interest in temperance from those who did. Some suffrage leaders worked hard to keep the two questions separate for exactly that reason.
The irony is that both sides got what they predicted. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, seven months after Prohibition took effect, and the two are permanently linked in the history even though neither caused the other.
The parts that have aged badly
The WCTU was a reform organisation of its time and carried the assumptions of its time. Its membership was overwhelmingly white, Protestant and middle-class, and its account of drink was frequently an account of immigrants. Southern chapters organised within segregation and argued for prohibition in terms that were explicitly racial.
Frances Willard’s own record on lynching is the sharpest case. In 1894 Ida B. Wells publicly challenged her over remarks that repeated the slander used to justify lynching in the South; Willard’s responses were evasive, and the confrontation is now a standard part of how both women are taught. It is not a footnote. It is what a “do everything” organisation looked like when it declined to do that one.
What it built that lasted
Scientific temperance instruction, for one — the WCTU got mandatory alcohol education written into the school curriculum of every state by 1901, which is a startling piece of legislative reach for an organisation whose members could not vote in most of them.
Beyond that: the public drinking fountain, promoted across American towns as an alternative to the saloon, which is why so many nineteenth-century examples carry temperance inscriptions. The first nationwide network of women’s political training. And a great deal of the organising that the suffrage campaign drew on when it finally succeeded.
The organisation still exists, headquartered in Evanston, Illinois in Willard’s own house, which is a museum.