WCTU

Starting in Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1873, Protestant women would enter saloons, pray, and sing hymns such as “Give to the winds thy fears”, and refuse to leave until the owner agreed to close the saloon. This quickly made Hillsboro dry, and newspapers spread the movement to the rest of the country. This was incredibly effective in small towns, but larger towns resisted, and cities had incredibly fierce reactions. From 1873 to 1874, the Women’s Crusade spread throughout the country and by the end of 1874 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded.

Even though the WCTU has temperance in its name, had the goal of outlawing gambling, tobacco, opium, pornography, prostitution, and of course alcohol. The WCTU was one of the first instances of large scale female involvement in American politics and challenged the idea that politics and protesting were activities reserved for men. The WCTU’s first president Annie Wittenmyer in her book History of the Woman’s Temperance Crusade compared the Woman’s Crusade and the WCTU to Revelation 8:5 “And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.”

The WCTU was an incredibly broad organization that was involved in incorporating a women’s college into Northwestern University and implementing a program of propaganda called “Scientific Temperance” into the public school curriculum which included providing lecturers, materials, trained teachers, and controlled textbooks that the WCTU ensured were against alcohol. In schools, children were shown graphic photographs of alcoholic deaths, alcohol was presented as a poison, and materials were designed to scare children away from alcohol. By 1891 thirty-five states required temperance education in their schools.