Woman's Christian Temperance Union Research Articles

War against Prohibition: Italians and Booze in New York City, 1920–1933

War against Prohibition: Italians and Booze in New York City, 1920–1933

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 by Sara Egge

Reviewed by: Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 by Sara Egge Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. 242 pp. $85 (cloth). In this fascinating and important work, Sara Egge recaptures the story of the upper midwestern fight over suffrage in the five decades prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Drawing on newspapers, archival sources, voluntary association records, and other materials, Egge takes readers on a deep dive into three counties that, over the period between 1870 and 1920, weighed the question of whether women should vote. She uses the histories of the suffrage debate in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota, to analyze midwestern political discourse surrounding not just suffrage but citizenship. In five succinct and well-argued chapters, Egge traces the five-decade trajectory of conversation surrounding suffrage. Her first chapter lays out the early histories of White settlement (at the expense of the Indigenous populations, she notes) and the meanings of community to settlers in the upper Midwest. Egge then describes, essentially, how women started behaving as citizens and participating in these communities in the decades prior to 1920. On the surface, Clay, Lyon, and Yankton women adhered to gender conventions while quietly defying them as they planned bazaars, worked in Ladies Aid Societies, and joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Egge argues that through such work as planning a bazaar, women were "recognized as loyal citizens intent on making their communities better" (52). That the women understood their work as actively subversive is not always clear, though Egge makes it very apparent that they knew better than to use such terms as "feminism." Even with this cautious approach, the story she tells is not one of linear progression towards the vote, but rather one of stops and starts, as voters defeated suffrage multiple times in the 1890s. In South Dakota, woman suffrage was defeated three times alone, leading the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to [End Page 79] denigrate the Midwest and leading Carrie Chapman Catt (herself Iowaborn) to blacklist the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association. In part, Egge's book intends to rescue the region's reputation and restore the Midwest, especially its rural parts, to its proper place in the history of suffrage activism. Her third chapter in particular offers great comparisons of the counties, where enfranchisement efforts failed for varied reasons, as well as discussion of the lessons suffragists in each place learned from the losses. Two important takeaways were realizations that local leadership needed to disentangle discussion and debate over temperance and suffrage and that they needed to shed their more radical language of individual liberty in favor of a language of civic responsibility. Suffrage advocates worked on both, combining Progressive Era ideals of civic participation with their own desire to vote. World War I was a watershed, as women's wartime efforts and the rampant "anti-German hysteria" convinced Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota voters to reverse course and confirm suffrage for White, native-born women (151). Egge argues that success came, in perhaps large part, because of a narrowing of the definition of citizen to one focused on loyalty to community rather than on individual rights. This, coupled with nativist sentiment and the historical context of WWI (which "shattered the tolerance of ethnic diversity in the Midwest"), allowed White native-born women to secure the franchise (155). The idea that racism and nativism shaped both suffrage activism and passage is of course not new, but Egge adds nuance to discussion of nativist and anti-German sentiment as well as to the divisions between NAWSA and upper midwestern groups. In particular, she reminds readers that in the early days of German, Norwegian, and Swedish immigration to the upper Midwest, Yankee settlers were "grateful" as well as "wary"—and dependent upon the immigrants in their community. Importantly, Egge interrogates citizenship as much as suffrage, looking closely at "the complex political identities women built," their evolution over five decades, and the broader interaction between geographical and regional identity (2). Throughout her work, she reminds us that...

In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 by Thomas J. Lappas

Reviewed by: In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 by Thomas J. Lappas Izumi Ishii In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933. By Thomas J. Lappas. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 321. $36.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6463-2.) Drawing on years of extensive archival research, Thomas J. Lappas explores the work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Indian communities. He focuses on Native American women who, as members of the WCTU, worked with white women for the cause of temperance at the turn of the twentieth century. Lappas poses the question of why Native American women took an interest in the work of the WCTU and became members. By analyzing Indian women [End Page 351] leaders' own words, he concludes that their reasons for joining the organization reflected both their degree of acculturation and their strong will to preserve their distinctiveness as Indians. The organization's Christian foundation also motivated many Indian women to join. Native women were aware of the devastating effects of alcohol on their communities, and they believed that the WCTU could help solve the problems they faced. Native women's writings reveal that they witnessed and even suffered from domestic violence caused by excessive drinking, which also spurred them to join the WCTU. Unfortunately, Indian women were rarely visible as individuals except for their role in the Loyal Temperance Legions organized for children. Being a member of the WCTU did not necessarily mean that Native women and their white counterparts acquired a better understanding of one another. The Union Signal and other WCTU publications helped perpetuate the stereotypical images of Indian savagery that offended the often well-educated Native members of the WCTU. The organization also weighed in on one of the most bitterly contested issues in Indian affairs at the turn of the twentieth century—the allotment of tribal land to individuals and the opening of surplus land to non-Indian homesteaders. Initially exempt from allotment, the five large Indian nations in eastern Oklahoma, known as Indian Territory, resisted extension of the policy to them. The national WCTU, however, passed a resolution supporting the merger of Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory WCTUs after Oklahoma statehood, a move that sorely disappointed Native members. In the end, the cause of temperance failed to forge ties of sympathy and friendship between Native WCTU women and white members. Instead, the WCTU found its strongest allies in Indian Territory among white missionaries rather than among Indian people. No one would challenge the author's statement that "[s]imply telling the story of the WCTU and Native Americans is valuable" (p. 5). Yet the best chapters are the ones that deal with non-Native women activists working for Indians and their communities, rather than "Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union" as the subtitle of the book indicates. The WCTU that Lappas depicts was not likely to be an organization where Indian women members and their white counterparts enjoyed a world of solidarity and sisterhood. Lappas's study reveals the intolerance that characterized the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in aiming to attain its ultimate goals, at the turn of the twentieth century. To what extent did Native women contribute to the success in the WCTU's crusade against alcohol, and what roles did they play in the wide-ranging activities of the WCTU? In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 gives readers an incentive to seek further what the organization meant to the Indian women who worked with assimilationist white reformers in the struggle for sobriety and at the same time strove valiantly to preserve their Native identity and tribal sovereignty. [End Page 352] Izumi Ishii Tokai University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel

Reviewed by: Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel Daniel Mandell Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896. By Charles Postel. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Pp. [x], 390. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-7963-6.) Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 examines the origins, leadership, policies, and evolution of three huge organizations—the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor—that emerged after the Civil War and became prominent national organizations pushing deep egalitarian reforms. Unfortunately, as Charles Postel shows, when these organizations each launched a southern strategy to gain national strength, they and their egalitarian ideals foundered on the rocks of racism and Redemption. Postel begins with the Grange, organized in December 1867 to advocate for farmers' rights against corporate interests. Although it embraced sexual equality, when the organization emphasized politics, women found themselves relegated to kitchens. More significant, one of the Grange founders, Oliver Kelley, sought sectional reconciliation, which meant "white solidarity between the northern farmer and the southern planter, and silence on the question of equality for African Americans" (p. 21). By the mid-1870s, Grange groups in the South were known for Ku Klux Klan activities and helped Democratic "redeemers" impose white rule, and those in the North built anticorporate coalitions with racist Democrats. Equality then delves into the WCTU, organized in 1873 and for decades the country's largest and most powerful women's organization. The WCTU [End Page 925] connected prohibition to sexual equality in the family, community, and workplace, with a liberal wing (led by Frances Willard) advocating woman suffrage. The WCTU similarly pursued white nationalist reconciliation, as Willard traveled to the South and returned to launch a national party that would "weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family" (p. 138). The WCTU incorporated racialist ideas in calls to limit the political rights of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. Postel then examines how the Knights of Labor became the first significant national labor organization after Terence V. Powderly became its head in 1879. It enlisted all laborers regardless of trade, skill, sex, or race (with the glaring exception of the Chinese). But in 1885, Powderly went south, like Kelley and Willard, and endorsed racial separation. Black laborers in the South still joined in large numbers as Knights leadership continued to push for equal wages and conditions, but that egalitarian element was shattered when white Louisianans joined to massacre striking cane workers in 1887. Equality ends by examining how, despite these organizations and the egalitarian writings by Henry George and Edward Bellamy, the United States descended into the Gilded Age and violent apartheid in the late 1880s. The Supreme Court overrode the Fourteenth Amendment in order to protect economic and racial hierarchies; the WCTU defended lynch mobs as defenders of white women; and the Knights through Powderly applauded the explicitly "whites only" Farmers' Alliance. These organizations, in combination with other groups, formed the People's Party in 1892, which marked the crest of the post–Civil War egalitarian wave but ultimately failed as racism created fatal fissures. An epilogue brings readers to the present, noting how labor unions played a critical role in forging a more equal nation during the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but were dismantled by corporations and their political allies in the 1980s. Postel's view of late-nineteenth-century America spotlights how the efforts of reformers to counter the growing power of wealthy corporations and "bosses" were undermined by the embrace of racism. He emphasizes the role of the South in this process, as each organization went off the rails when their leadership forged alliances with white elites in the region. While readers might want to know more about the nation's racist soil that seemed so receptive to those southern seeds, Postel's deep dig into the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor provides useful lessons about reform efforts during that period as well as about the persistent fissures in the long effort to build "a just and equal society" (p. 318). Daniel Mandell Truman State University Copyright © 2020 Southern...

In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 by Thomas John Lappas

Reviewed by: In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933 by Thomas John Lappas Sarah Eppler Janda In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933. By Thomas John Lappas. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Many historians have examined the complex ways in which gender, race, religion, class, and culture shaped the American Temperance Movement. However, the ways in which Native American women navigated, shaped, and were shaped by temperance ideals has too often gone overlooked or has been examined in more one-dimensional ways. Thomas J. Lappas's book, In League Against King Alcohol: Native American Women and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933, offers a thorough examination of the motivations and ideals of Indigenous women who sought opportunities to improve the circumstances in their communities [End Page 218] through the work of temperance. Lappas does an excellent job of contextualizing the place of Native American women in their communities and in their efforts to eradicate alcohol consumption. The book is divided into six chapters, each of which explores the interplay between the ideals than underpin temperance and the role of Native American women. The first few chapters focus more directly on Native American women and their relationship to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). These chapters are particularly noteworthy for bringing attention not only to the roles played by individual women, such as Lilah Denton Lindsey (Creek) and Jane Stapler (Cherokee), but also for examining how these women viewed temperance through their own cultural lens. Additionally, Lappas examines the depiction of Native Americans in WCTU literature, as well as efforts to promote temperance culture at Indian boarding schools and the efforts to organize temperance unions in Indian Country. The cultural bias implicit in the characterizations of Native Americans and the denigration of Native traditions, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, ultimately helps explain what Lappas describes as the "mixed legacy" of WCTU work. While this book discusses the work of the WCTU throughout the United States, it is especially noteworthy for the focus on temperance in the Southwest. For example, chapter 4 explores temperance work in Indian Country, revealing the significance of women's networks in community-based efforts to eradicate alcohol consumption. Helen M. Stoddard, the president of the Texas WCTU, spent a month in Indian Territory working with organizers. Female networks, including cross-cultural alliances, proved central to the successes of the WCTU. Lappas balances his commitment to showing the role of Native American women in the Temperance Movement with a strong inclination toward contextualizing their work in connection to their communities, cultures, religious beliefs, and larger networks that included non-Native women. The book is thoroughly researched and draws on archival materials from over thirty repositories across the country. Lappas skillfully uses these sources to give voice to Indigenous women while also shedding light on the shared social and religious culture generated by those immersed in the WCTU. Ultimately, Lappas concludes that the WCTU "should be seen as having a mixed legacy in Indian work" (248). Although the organization had lofty aims of eradicating alcohol and all of the social and economic problems that came with it, their reform framework too often came at the expense of Indigenous culture and tradition. This book makes a strong contribution to the historiography of temperance and women's networks, but also to the history of Native American women, particularly in Indian Country. [End Page 219] Sarah Eppler Janda Cameron University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello

Reviewed by: Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello Natalie A. Naylor (bio) Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State By Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello. Ithaca: Three Hills, 2017. 316 pages, 6" x 9". $29.95 cloth. This year, 2020, is the Centennial of the 19th Amendment when women achieved the right to vote in the United States. Three years earlier, women in New York State won suffrage in a referendum in 1917, which was pivotal for the national movement. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello in Women Will Vote provide a comprehensive account of the suffrage struggle in New York in the seven decades that they dub "From Ridicule to Referendum" (1). Their useful Timeline begins in 1827 with the abolition of slavery in New York, and four events when women sought political rights in New York prior to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention (xv–xvii). The authors focus much of their attention on five disparate groups who have not received sufficient attention in most accounts: male suffragists, rural, working-class immigrant, African American, and radical women. Each of these groups is the subject of one of their chapters. Moreover, they want to emphasize upstate New York (defined as outside the metropolitan New York City area). In the nineteenth century, suffrage activities and organization were most extensive upstate. The New York State Woman Suffrage Association was organized in Saratoga in 1869 and held 47 yearly conventions to 1917 (Appendix 1 conveniently lists and maps the dates and locations). In the last decades of the century, suffrage activity was concentrated in the central and western counties of the state. Local leaders upstate regarded New York City as a "lost cause" (39). New York City, however, had a majority of the state's population after adding Brooklyn in 1898. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Martha Coffin Wright, Jean Brooks Greenleaf, and Lillie [End Page 150] Devereaux Blake were among the upstate presidents and leaders of the State Association. The Association worked on a variety of suffrage efforts, including petition drives, school suffrage, and legislative lobbying. By 1910, the state organization had 155 affiliated clubs in 26 counties with 555,00 members. The largest club was in Geneva with 400 members. More information might have been included on this organization, though by the early twentieth century, it was "dominated by an elite leadership primarily located in New York City" (50). National leaders from New York, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Carrie Chapman Catt, are included throughout the book. Others who played important roles nationally and in New York include Gertrude Foster Brown, Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Inez Milholland, Vira Boar-man Whitehouse, and Harriet May Mills. Except for Mills, who was based in Syracuse, each of these women was based in New York City. Information on rural upstate women is a major contribution. Churches, granges, lyceums, lecture circuits, women's clubs, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) all were involved in suffrage efforts in a "complex network" of "concurrent activism," which extended to the other groups discussed (3). Rochester, with 40 percent of its population immigrants in 1900, had many women working in the garment industry The analysis of suffrage in Rochester is insightful; both the city and county voted against suffrage in the 1915 referendum. Most of the African American suffrage leaders discussed were from New York City or Brooklyn, including Sarah Garnet, Verina Morton Jones, and Victoria Earle Mathews. Heather Jeffrey did form a Susan B. Anthony Club for Colored Women in Rochester; it, like most of the black organizations, had a broader focus than suffrage, also confronting racism. The attention paid to male suffragists is welcome, focusing on the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, founded in New York City in 1909. (Brooke Kroeger's Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, also published in 2017, provides further detail on men in the movement.) The activities of anti-suffragists are included throughout (Goodier had published No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement in 2013). Most of the radical women were based in New York City...

"For God and Home and Native Land": The Haudenosaunee and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, 1884–1921

This article examines two Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) women, Eliza Pierce and Lydia Pierce (unrelated), within the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Their participation in an ostensibly assimilationist, progressive institution was balanced by congruities between traditional Haudenosaunee cultural elements and the activities of the WCTU. I argue that while both women were Christians and supporters of Euro-American educational practices, they worked to preserve many traditions of the Iroquois, notably women's participation in the political and familial realms. Thus, Haudenosaunee WCTU members both defended and redefined tradition while asserting their place in the twentieth-century United States.

Preparing for the Politics of Life: An Expansion of the Political Dimensions of College Women's Literary Societies

One week before the 1908 U.S. presidential election, the women of the Hesperian Literary Society at the State University of Iowa (SUI, now the University of Iowa) presented “a unique program” in the form of a mock political rally. Imagining that they lived in a town where women had “been honored by the legislature with the ballot,” the “Hep” members divided into clubs that supported various candidates and causes. Several women formed the Utopian Club, which promoted William Jennings Bryan's presidential candidacy, while the members who comprised the Women's Culture Club supported William Howard Taft. Heps who pretended to belong to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) argued for prohibition. Portraying the era's political dynamism, other Heps represented anarchists, socialists, and independents. A woman from each group spoke in support of her cause in front of a crowd that included “a lot of” college men. SUI senior and Hep member Ione Mulnix described the rally in a letter to her parents: “[T]he speeches were of course very ridiculous. The reasons why each was the best were very feminine and would hardly convince aman.” She explained that the Utopian Club representative “argued for Bryan because he was the best looking.” The Heps ended their program by setting loose a toy mouse, causing the actors to scream and scatter. Finding the fictitious rally “awfully funny,” Mulnix noted that the Hep women “acted their parts to perfection” and that the college men “seemed to appreciate it immensely.”

Reforming Japan: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (review)

Reviewed by: Reforming Japan: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period Yosuke Nirei Reforming Japan: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period. By Elizabeth Dorn Lublin. 264264 pages. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2010 (hardcover $85.00). University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 (softcover $32.95). The Meiji period brought the Japanese archipelago and people to the forefront of world history and modernity, and the Japanese converts to Protestantism who emerged during this time were more than just religionists; indeed, though few in number they played a central role in Japan's intellectual and social modernization. Elizabeth Dorn Lublin has written an important and admirable book that helps us to understand the vicissitudes of the Meiji Protestant movement. Reforming Japan examines the establishment and evolution of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)—one of the country's most important reformist and oldest women's associations—and its central programs over the last two decades of the Meiji period. The book, moreover, not only tells the story of the WCTU as a "case study" of Meiji civic activism, but also contains many insights that can be applied to other modernist intellectuals and reformist activities of the period. Reforming Japan is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The WCTU in Meiji Japan: An Organizational History," chronicles the two decades of the WCTU's development in three chapters. The first chapter explains the connections between the expansion of the American temperance movement overseas and the rise of Protestantism in Meiji Japan, placing special emphasis on the work of American activist Mary Clement Leavitt. Leavitt, Lublin claims, worked as a "catalyst" (p. 32) for the formation of a WCTU branch in Tokyo by gaining the recognition of prominent male enlightenment intellectuals (also Protestants) and the support of Japanese Protestant women. Leavitt's arrival and the establishment of the Tokyo branch of the WCTU in 1886 occurred almost simultaneously with the WCTU's broad overseas outreach and with Meiji Japan's rapid Westernization and fever for "social reform." The WCTU added more branches throughout the country and managed to establish a national umbrella organization in 1892, but from the end of the 1880s to the early 1890s, the Japan WCTU as a whole, as well as the Protestant movement in Japan, experienced a severe setback, as outlined in the remainder of part 1. Lublin cites the general political, educational, and legal changes (such as the procedural debacle in the government's revision of its Unequal Treaties with the West as well as the promulgations of the Imperial Constitution, the Civil Code, and the Educational Rescript) that formed the backdrop to these difficulties, but what really stands out in her account of this period is the internal struggle between conservative leader Yajima Kajiko and radical member Sasaki Toyoju for leadership of the organization. This was a defining moment for the future of WCTU activism and a key to understanding the ideological assumptions behind the movement's reformist program. [End Page 355] Also notable is Lublin's stress on the importance, both symbolic and substantive, of American missionaries such as Leavitt, Mary Allen West, and Clara Parrish (photographs of all three are included in the book) in developing the Japanese WCTU as a whole and bringing together discordant and sometimes disorganized Japanese groups at critical moments in the union's historical evolution. Lublin vividly describes the distinctive passion of these American women for spreading reform, as well as their methodical and diligent efforts (West, incidentally, died during her missionary tour in Japan), and she draws an interesting contrast with the personal rivalry and ideological conflict that existed among Japanese Christian women of the time. Perhaps intentionally, Lublin did not include the word "Japanese" in the book's subtitle; certainly, the early organization could not be described without mention of the significant input provided by American missionary women. Indeed, as Lublin says, it was the "convergence" of historical developments in both countries (p. 14) that came into historical play. Part 2, "Under the Guise of National Strengthening and 'Good' Citizenship: Pillars of the WCTU's Reform Program," brings the reader back to the early formative period of the movement and to the...

Parlor Pink Turned Soapbox Red: The Trial of Charlotte Anita Whitney

On October 23, 1925, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) unanimously passed a resolution declaring its intention to help Charlotte Anita Whitney, a card-carrying Communist, avoid prison. ...

From Pabst to Pepsi: The Deinstitutionalization of Social Practices and the Creation of Entrepreneurial Opportunities

In this paper, we examine the dual role that social movement organizations can play in altering organizational landscapes by undermining existing organizations and creating opportunities for the growth of new types of organizations. Empirically, we investigate the impact of a variety of tactics employed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the leading organizational representative of the American temperance movement, on two sets of organizations: breweries and soft drink producers. By delegitimating alcohol consumption, altering attitudes and beliefs about drinking, and promoting temperance legislation, the WCTU contributed to brewery failures. These social changes, in turn, created opportunities for entrepreneurs to found organizations producing new kinds of beverages by creating demand for alternative beverages, providing rationales for entrepreneurial action, and increasing the availability of necessary resources.

Woman's Temple, Women's Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory

In 1996 a statue of three women who had worked for woman's suffrage, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was moved from the first-floor crypt of the nation's capitol into the second-floor rotunda. Much was made of this acknowledgment of women's work in the stately seat of power; no mention was made of a similar tribute, one floor above, that had occurred nearly one hundred years earlier. Frances Elizabeth Willard, orator and reformer who had led the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for most of its nineteenth-century history, had become the first woman commemorated in the capitol, and the only woman so honored for more than fifty years. 1 By 1905, the year of the statue's installation, the WCTU had become the largest and most influential activist movement of women in the country, extending that power into the twentieth century, taking an active and powerful role in the passage of the eighteenth and nineteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as hundreds of other laws affecting women and children. 2 The significance of the Willard memorialization extends beyond the representation in Statuary Hall, however, as Willard's organization made tributes to women one of its primary objectives. Despite the power and efforts of the WCTU at the turn of the twentieth century, this massive effort to recognize women and their accomplishments has been largely forgotten at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here, I will examine efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to build monuments and to

To Eliminate Colour Prejudice: The WCTU and Decolonisation in Australia

From the mid‐1930s to the mid‐1960s the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Australia played a key role in the articulation and development of human rights for Aborigines. They provided practical and political support and scaffolding while developing an important ideological base, and they formed alliances across class, gender, race, religious, and political lines to achieve their goal of racial equality. Their activism coincided with the period associated with decolonisation. It has been argued that, in Australia, the end of empire coalesced with the rise of the labour movement in the 1940s. However, this article argues that as a means of understanding WCTU involvement in defending and shaping an Aboriginal rights agenda, the rise of labour is an important but partial explanation. It downplays the role of gender and religion in formulating an ideological position while masking its political implications. Here, I explore the politics of WCTU reform, particularly connections between gender, religion, and race, and trace the Union's defence of Aboriginal human rights in post war Australia.

"The Humaner Instinct of Women": Hannah Bailey and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's Critique of Militarism and Manliness in the Late Nineteenth Century

From its founding in 1887, the National Peace and Arbitration Department of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), led by Hannah Johnston Bailey (1839–1923), provided an important source of women's peace activism. Bailey used the strength and organization of the WCTU to promote the peace movement, reaching beyond male-dominated peace societies to appeal directly to women. Her work, particularly in the area of peace education, laid the foundation for other peace activists in the early twentieth century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, when many Americans began to express concern over the decline of masculinity, the women of the WCTU challenged the association of patriotism with manliness and militarism. Instead, they advocated a new definition, seeking to replace the martial ideal with one emphasizing public service.

More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Ohio Women (review)

Reviewed by: More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Ohio Women Ginette Aley More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Ohio Women. By Greta Anderson. (Helena, Mont.: Globe Pequot Press, 2005. viii, 152 pp. Paper $10.95, ISBN 0-7627-3625-9.) Ohio has been home to many notable women whose influences were responsible for altering the course of local, state, or national history. Greta Anderson's More than Petticoats: Remarkable Ohio Women, which is geared toward a popular rather than a scholarly audience, introduces us to twelve diverse women with Ohio roots whose ambitions often brought them face to face with the social or political mores of their era. Undeterred, their lives symbolized a popular nineteenth-century adage that urged, "Let us be up and doing." The profiles, chronologically arranged, depict a diverse lineup of public minded women. The list includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eliza Trimble Thompson, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, Victoria Woodhull, Hallie Quinn Brown, Annie Oakley, Helen Taft, Jane Edna Hunter, Florence Allen, Ella Stewart, Lois Lenski, and Dorothy Fuldheim. Readers learn not only about their causes and achievements but also the personal and social contexts within which they developed. These women envisioned lives that went beyond themselves. Stowe's widely read Uncle Tom's Cabin, which began as serial installments in 1851, made slavery's inhumanity to black women, men, and families starkly and emotionally real to northerners. In doing so, it moved the nation closer to Civil War. Rough-mannered "Mother" Bickerdyke, who once assisted fugitive slaves in the Underground Railroad, found her life's mission doing "the Lord's work" as an unpaid sanitary and medical volunteer in the Union army, and later in fund-raising for the Northwest Sanitary Commission. Her devotion to soldiers was as strong as she was sharp tongued; yet, Gen. William Sherman steadfastly defended her as "the one person around here who outranks me" (25). Like many, "Mother" Thompson had become swept up in the temperance movement, which identified alcohol as the ruination of American society. In 1874, largely as a result of her spearheading campaign in Hillsboro, the Ohio Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed, followed almost immediately by the creation of the national WCTU in Cleveland. Some of the women here cultivated a rich public life. Notorious Victoria Woodhull, an ardent spiritualist, free-love advocate, and women's rights [End Page 141] lobbyist, pursued an entrepreneurial career that took her to New York City in the late 1860s. There she sold personal products to the major brothels and, in the process, came to know some of the powerful men who frequented them, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. Through Vanderbilt she made a fortune in the stock market. Annie "Little Sure Shot" Oakley had already built her reputation as a fine hunter and game supplier while still a young woman. She later became the first white woman to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. African American pharmacist Ella Stewart consistently confronted and prevailed over racial barriers as she engaged not only in her business but also in her wide-ranging club activities in Toledo and beyond. This is not a scholarly work and students of women's history may be put off by the pejorative series title, More Than Petticoats. Yet readers will find these women interesting, if not inspiring. [End Page 142] Ginette Aley University of Southern Indiana Copyright © 2008 The Kent State University Press

THE CREATION OF PUBLIC SPACES BY WOMEN IN THE EARLY MEIJI PERIOD AND THE TŌKYŌ FUJIN KYŌFŪKAI

Other than a few remarkable exceptions, and because of their lack of social, educational, and political rights, women of the early Meiji period (1868–1890) have often been regarded as powerless actors in the formation and expansion of the bourgeoning Japanese public sphere. Following the research that feminist scholars have developed over the past twenty years on the redefinition of Jürgen Habermas' concepts of “public” and “private” in relation to Western women's lives, I would like to demonstrate how, even when lacking the possibility of changing their lives, some groups of Japanese women during the 1880s were nevertheless able to gather together, bring forth demands in public settings, and make public topics of discussion that had hither to been considered unworthy of public debate and pertaining only to the private lives of Japanese male citizens. In order to do so, I will take into consideration some of the activities organized by the women belonging to the Tōkyō Fujin Kyōfūkai, the Japanese branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.).

The Alcohol History Collection at the Center of Alcohol Studies: A Valuable Resource on American Temperance And Prohibition

The American temperance movement, which culminated in the thirteen-year dry hiatus known as National Prohibition, provides a fascinating look at one of the most colorful eras in our history. By the 1830s, American alcohol consumption had peaked at an all-time high of 7.1 gallons of absolute alcohol per capita annually--more than three times the current consumption rate of 2.18 gallons. As drunkenness grew, many concerned citizens reacted by forming societies advocating the temperate use of alcohol (which generally meant moderate use of beer or wine, but no use of hard liquor). However, as the century progressed, fears arising from industrialization and the growing tide of immigration led most temperance leaders to call for total abstinence from all alcoholic beverages as a means of protecting society from the ravages of drink. The Woman's Crusade of the 1870s and the formation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) reflected the concerns of Americans across the social spectrum for the protection of the family and the maintenance of social norms based largely on Protestant Christian values (although many Catholics and others shared temperance sympathies as well). The Alcohol History Collection at the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies provides a valuable look into the attitudes, events, organizations, and leaders of those times.

"Brewers and Distillers Paradise": American Views of Canadian Alcohol Policies, 1919 to 1935

In 1924, at Rest Cottage, Evanstown, Illinois, Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) President Anna A. Gordon marked an historic occasion. She gathered together WCTU workers and rang the "Jubilee Bell," announcing that "Ontario has gone dry." Accom- panied on the pianoforte, the women sang the doxology. Four years into American national prohibition, Gordon was celebrating the fact that dry sisters and brothers north of the border had beaten back an attempt to overturn provincial prohi- bition. Speaking at the Ontario WCTU convention weeks earlier, Gordon had reminded her audience that in the forthcoming pleb- iscite they would be voting "not only for Ontario, but for Can- ada, the Empire and the World as well" (CWRTNov. 1924).

"Brewers and Distillers Paradise": American Views of Canadian Alcohol Policies, 1919 to 1935

In 1924, at Rest Cottage, Evanstown, Illinois, Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) President Anna A. Gordon marked an historic occasion. She gathered together WCTU workers and rang the "Jubilee Bell," announcing that "Ontario has gone dry." Accom- panied on the pianoforte, the women sang the doxology. Four years into American national prohibition, Gordon was celebrating the fact that dry sisters and brothers north of the border had beaten back an attempt to overturn provincial prohi- bition. Speaking at the Ontario WCTU convention weeks earlier, Gordon had reminded her audience that in the forthcoming pleb- iscite they would be voting "not only for Ontario, but for Can- ada, the Empire and the World as well" (CWRTNov. 1924).

A Reflexive Inquiry of Two Non-Smokers: A Trans-Generational Tale of Social Gospel and Social Norms Marketing

Over the course of one academic year, two researchers combined research methods of reflexive inquiry and memory-work to understand the situated learning during their teen years in terms of its influence on their not taking up cigarette smoking. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the influence of the social gospel were central to the Ontario farm community in which Dorothy grew up in the 1960s. Angie grew up in small town Nova Scotia during the 1990s, exposed to parental smoking and the social marketing of the health hazards of smoking. The researchers draw on the critical incident questionnaire (Brookfield, 1995) as a way to remember 'nodal moments' in their smoking/non-smoking autobiographies. Their autobiographies serve as embodied reflexive texts and triggers to engage in dialogue on the deeper social meaning of not taking up smoking as teenagers. They conclude that traces of the social gospel remain as an influence in Angie's teen years, and that Dorothy was exposed to anti-smoking social marketing in the 1960s even before it had this name.