Separate Paths: Suffragists and the Women's Temperance Crusade

Abstract

For students of the dialectic between human condition and response, nineteenth-century American women represent a special problem. Because we still live in the shadow of their world, we are often tempted to take what we share with them as a reliable guide to their experience. But in doing so, we risk oversimplifying and thereby misunderstanding both the conditions faced by nineteenth-century women and their responses. Women reformers are a case in point. During the nineteenth century, women organized for change in a variety of movements besides suffrage-most notably temperance, antislavery, and moral reform. Yet no matter what goal they sought, analysis of their actions usually beginsand too often ends-with the question, Were they feminists? Because their world contained, sometimes in exaggerated form, many of the elements against which late twentieth-century feminists struggle, the question is a natural one. But because their world contained other elements as well, a focus on feminism's presence or absence in women's reform activities can be misleading. Of nineteenth-century women's reform movements, temperance was by far the largest. From the beginning of their organized activity in the 1820s, women evidently contributed between one-third and one-half of the temperance movement's mass support. But until 1873 they worked