The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Creation of a Politicize

The Womans Christian Temperance amount and the substructure of a Politicized Female Reform CultureIn 1879, a aggroup of evangelical churchwomen, all members of the Illinois Womans Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), presented to their state legislature a massive petition asking that Illinois women be granted the right to vote. The architect of this ambitious petition campaign, which resulted in 180,000 signatures of support, was Frances Willard, then president of the Illinois WCTU. In using her position as a undischarged WCTU leader to agitate for enfranchisement of women, Willard went against the express commands of the National WCTU and its president, Annie Wittenmeyer, who had made exhaust only one year earlier that the WCTU would not involve itself in any way with the right to vote movement. Willards efforts to build support for suffrage within the WCTU were only a part of a larger invention of change. During the 1880s, WCTU members constructed a highly politicized wom ens reform culture that supported both womens enfranchisement and political partisanship. This essay looks at the first iv years of this culture through some of the people and events that were nigh authoritative to its growth. Founded in 1874, the late nineteenth century WCTU quickly became one of the most powerful reform organizations in the United States. By the mid-1880s, the WCTU boasted a rank and file near 100,000 and chapters in incessantlyy state and territory, making it the first authentically national womens organization in the country. The size and influence of the WCTU during this stream was unprecedented no other womens reform organization had ever had its power and scope. For the first time, tens of thousands of women were entering the public orbit as agitators a... ...oliticalespecially in the South and, to a lesser extent, in small towns in the Norththe national chapters unswerving devotion to politicized reform created a culture that encompassedbut mini mally infringed uponeven non-political WCTUs.Although temperance womens adhesiveness with the Prohibition party failed to result in their enfranchisement, or in a influential political party led by women, (the partys influence peaked in 1884, and by 1892 it was once again of negligible political importance), the WCTU nevertheless helped shape a distinct political sphere for women. And the extensive amount of moral legislation that WCTU women successfully agitated for at the state and local levels, such as prohibition, blue laws, age of consent, shallow suffrage for women, and scientific temperance education in public schools is establish of how strong that culture was.