RUTH BORDIN
"A Baptism of Power and Liberty"
The Women's Crusade of 1873-1874
Throughout the winter of 1873 and 1874
a grass roots women's tem-
perance crusade swept through Ohio, the
Midwest and parts of the
East. Thousands of women marched in the
streets, prayed in saloons
and organized their own temperance
societies in hundreds of towns
and cities of the American heartland.
The Crusade had an immense
impact on these women. Cut loose from
the quiescence and public
timidity that was their prescribed role,
the Crusade gave to many
American women a new sense of identity,
a taste of collective power
and an acquaintance with the larger
world of the public platform.
"We have had no wonderful crusade
in England" observed the promi-
nent British temperance worker Margaret
Parker to her American sis-
ters, a decade later, "no such
baptism of power and liberty." Parker
reported that unlike their American
sisters, English women still be-
lieved that "woman's voice should
only be heard within the four walls
of her own home."1
Parker correctly saw the Crusade as a
watershed in the participa-
tion of American women in the temperance
movement. Before the
Crusade of 1873-1874, American women
(much like their British
counterparts) played a relatively minor
and passive role, but for twen-
ty-five years afterwards, until the
growth of the Anti-Saloom League
at the turn of the century, women
provided the major and most crea-
tive leadership for the temperance
movement. Their organization,
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU), organized as a
Ruth Bordin is currently a lecturer in
the history department at Eastern Michigan Uni-
versity and previously served for ten
years as Curator of Manuscripts at the Michigan
Historical Collections, University of
Michigan. Another version of this paper was pre-
sented at the Conference on the History
of Women, St. Catherine's College, in October
1977.
1. Union Signal, December 20, 1883, 6. Temperance and Prohibition
Papers, Na-
tional Headquarters file, WCTU (joint
Ohio Historical Society-Michigan Historical Col-
lections-WCTU microfilm edition, Union
Signal series, roll 1) (hereafter cited as Union
Signal). Margaret Parker was a Scots woman who served as
president of the first inter-
national Woman's Christian Temperance
Union in 1876.
394 OHIO HISTORY
result of the Crusade, in turn provided
the single most effective outlet
for the growing women's movement.
The Crusade began almost accidentally.
On December 22, 1873, a
professional lecturer, Diocletian Lewis,
well into his fall tour, gave a
public address called "Our
Girls" at the Music Hall in Hillsboro, Ohio.
Educated at Harvard and trained in
homeopathic medicine, Lewis
was a leading advocate of physical
exercise and an active life for
women and an ardent temperance man. His
appearance in Hillsboro
was part of the regular winter course of
lectures sponsored by the
local lyceum association. Lewis had a
free day before he was to ap-
pear in a neighboring town, and someone
in his audience suggested that
he give a temperance lecture in
Hillsboro the next evening, Sunday
the twenty-third. Because the cause was
one in which he thoroughly
believed he willingly agreed. Lewis
called his temperance address,
"The Duty of Christian Women in the
Cause of Temperance."
That evening Lewis told his customary
story about his own family.
Forty years ago his father had been a
drinking man, and his mother,
sorely distressed by his father's
regular patronage of a local saloon
in Saratoga, New York, had appealed in
desperation to the owner to
cease selling spirits, had prayed in the
saloon with several of her
friends, and had actually succeeded in
getting the saloon keeper to
close his business. Lewis suggested that
if his mother had been able
to do this many years ago, why could not
the women of Hillsboro do
the same in 1873.
By that December evening he had made his
appeal about the
power of women's prayers in the grog
shops approximately three
hundred times, and the plan he outlined
had already been tried in some
twenty instances before. As early as
1858, he inspired fifty women to
march praying into the saloons of Dixon,
Illinois. They continued
their non-violent assault for six days
until all the community's saloons
had closed. Two months later women tried
the scheme in Battle
Creek, Michigan. One of its more
successful applications occured in
Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1869.
Lewis had made the same
speech ten days before in Fredonia, New
York. Over two hundred
women followed his suggestion and
marched to the saloons the fol-
lowing day for prayer and song. The next
morning they organized a
temperance society, but they did not
continue their marches.2
Before Hillsboro the results of Lewis'
appeal had always been
2. Mary Eastman, Biography of Dio
Lewis (New York, 1891), 24-60; see also Fran-
cis M. Whitaker, "A History of the
Ohio Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874-
1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio
State University, 1971), 128-32.
Women's Temperance Crusade 395
temporary and local, but this time his
appeal fell on fertile ground.
The women in the audience took up the
challenge with enthusiasm.
Early the next morning nearly two
hundred lined up outside the church
in a column of twos, the shortest
leading the way, and began to
march on several local saloons singing
"Give to the Winds Thy
Fears." Marching that Christmas Eve
day on the cold and sunless
streets of Hillsboro, these women
touched off a mass movement
which soon engulfed hundreds of towns
and cities in Ohio, the Mid-
west, and, to a lesser extent, in the
Northeast and West.3
The typical crusade began with a public
meeting in a church or
hall where an audience, composed chiefly
of women, prayed together
and listened to temperance speakers,
frequently female. Within a
day
or two they deployed throughout the community for "street
work," which could involve the
methodical circulation of temperance
petitions or, more spectacularly, the
march of a mass delegation to
confront one or more saloon keepers.
Almost never were they accom-
panied by sympathetic men, and in the
larger cities hostile crowds of-
ten harrassed the group. When crusaders
entered a saloon they usually
prayed together for a moment, then asked
the proprietor to pour out
his stock and close his business. Mark
Twin described such a con-
frontation. Accosting the saloon keeper,
the crusaders would:
offer up a special petition for him; he
has to stand meekly there behind his
bar, under the eyes of a great concourse
of ladies who are better than he is
and are aware of it, and hear all the
iniquities of his business divulged to the
angels above, accompanied by the sharp
sting of wishes for his regenera-
tion ... If he holds out bravely, the
crusaders hold out more bravely
still . . .4
Within three months of Hillsboro, such
campaigns had successfully,
if temporarily, closed thousands of
saloons and driven the liquor busi-
3. Among the many descriptions of the
crusade are: Annie Wittenmyer, History of
the Woman's Temperance Crusade (Philadelphia, 1878); Eliza Jane Thompson, Hills-
boro Crusade Sketches and Family
Records (Cincinnati, 1906); Matilda
Carpenter,
The Crusade: Its Origin and
Development at Washington Court House and its Results
(Columbus, 1893); and W. C. Steel, The
Woman's Temperance Movement, A Concise
History of the War on Alcohol (New York, 1874). Most of the issue of December 20,
1883, of the Union Signal, the
official organ of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
is devoted to reminiscences and
evaluations of the Crusade. T. A. H. Brown, reporter
for the Cincinnati Gazette, who
covered the Crusade for his paper, wrote a long, par-
tially eye-witness account called
"A Full Description of the Origin and Progress of the
New Plan of Labor by the Women Up to the
Present Time," which appeared in Jane
E. Stebbins, Fifty Years' History of
the Temperance Cause (Hartford, 1876). See also
Dio Lewis in his Prohibition A
Failure: The True Solution of the Temperance Question
(Boston, 1875), and Eastman's Dio
Lewis.
4. Union Signal, June 4, 1885, 5.
396 OHIO
HISTORY
ness out of more than 250 American
communities. Women crusaders
took to the streets in 130 Ohio towns
and cities, Michigan had thirty-
six crusades, Indiana thirty-four,
Pennsylvania twenty-six, New Jersey
seventeen. The movement spread to
twenty-three states in all.5
While the Crusade began in small towns
and cities in agricultural
areas, it soon spread to a number of
larger cities. Cleveland, Cincin-
nati, Chicago, Philadelphia and Brooklyn
are among the metropoli-
tan centers which experienced crusades.
Before summer was over,
750 breweries closed. The production of
malt liquor dropped over five
and one-half million gallons in 1874,
and federal excise taxes dropped
sharply in some districts.6 Although
most saloons were open again
by fall, and the results were
transitory, this was the first women's
mass movement in American history. Women
were taking to the
streets in significant numbers using
methods they had never before
used on such a scale.
Why did a women's temperance crusade
catch fire during the winter
of 1873-1874? Intimately linked to
revivalism and abolitionism, tem-
perance had become a national issue as
one of the great antebellum
reform movements that swept the North in
the Jacksonian era. By
the 1830s some temperance advocates had
turned from a perfectionist
concern with individual abstinence to an
advocacy of legal prohibi-
tion, and several states adopted
statutes prohibiting or regulating the
sale of alcohol in the years before the
Civil War. Temperance agita-
tion declined during the great conflict,
but quickly revived in the
reform
atmosphere that accompanied the early reconstruction years.7
Membership in the Ohio branch of the
Independent Order of Good
Templars, which accepted women on an
equal basis with men, rose
from 3,755 in 1865 to nearly 28,000 in
less than three years.8
5. Ibid., September 30, 1923, 4. The total number is probably an
underestimate.
Elizabeth Putnam Gordon, Women Torch
Bearers, The Story of the Woman's Chris-
tian Temperance Movement (Evanston, 1924), 7, puts the figure at 250. Actually
there
were more. Accounts of 255 individual
crusades appear in Wittenmyer's Crusade His-
tory and that record is incomplete.
6. Mary Earhart, Frances Willard:
From Prayers to Politics (Chicago, 1944), 141;
Norton Mezvinsky, "White Ribbon
Reform: 1874-1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, 1958),
54-60. The panic of 1873 may have been
responsible for some of this drop in produc-
tion, but some of it is certainly
traceable to the Crusade.
7. Alice Tyler, Freedom's Ferment:
Phases of American History to 1860 (Minnea-
polis, 1944), chapter 13, contains a
concise history of the early temperance movement.
John Allen Krout's The Origins of
Prohibition (New York, 1925) is the classic work on
the period. Norman Clark's Deliver Us
From Evil (New York, 1976) is the best inter-
pretative account and a major
contribution to the understanding of the temperance
movement as a whole.
8. Whitaker, "Ohio WCTU,"
111-12.
Women's Temperance Crusade 397 |
|
A more immediate impetus toward reform came with Ohio's 1873- 1874 constitutional convention that heatedly debated the liquor li- cense issue and the regulation of the liquor traffic in general. At this time the state did not license liquor dealers and forbad the selling of spirits in saloons, where only beer and wine could be vended. More- over, under the existing Ohio law, an individual could be refused per- mission to buy liquor or beer if a relative asked that he not be served. Liquor interests wanted the convention to license saloons to sell spirits, but Ohio's temperance forces furiously opposed such regu- lation on the grounds that state licensing of drink implied state ap- proval of intemperance and drunkenness. Divided over the issue, the constitutional convention shifted resolution of the licensing amend- ment to the voters. In the August 1874 election Ohioans defeated li- censing, but at the same time turned down the new constitution which would have enforced the decision. Although the end result was a frustrating stalemate, the public debate had kept the temperance question in the public mind all through 1873 and 1874.9 However, none of this directly explains why the temperance cru- sade was a women's movement of such immense proportions. Before
9. Charles A. Isetts, "The Woman's Christian Temperance Crusade of Ohio" (M. A. thesis, Miami University, 1971), 49; also Whitaker, "Ohio WCTU," 124-25, 274. |
398 OHIO HISTORY
the early 1870s women's role in the
temperance agitation had always
been subordinate to that of men,
especially in the public or political
realm. This reflected the nineteenth
century's dominant sexual ideol-
ogy which assigned to men and women
sharply defined sexual
"spheres." Men functioned in
the world of politics and commence;
women presided over the spiritual and
physical maintenance of home
and family.10 Their role at
home or in society was to provide moral
suasion and good example. As long as
temperance agitation emphasized
individual redemption and personal
abstention, women worked easily,
if quietly, within the movement, but
they were not to participate in its
public phases. When they sought to play
a larger role, they were quickly
rebuffed. In 1852, for example, Susan B.
Anthony, denied the right to
speak at a convention of New York
temperance societies, organized the
first state society of women temperance
advocates.11
But the drink issue itself proved
subversive to the maintenance of
a hard division between the sexual
spheres. Once the temperance
movement had shifted its attention from
moral suasion to legislative
prohibition, reformers directed much of
their effort toward closing the
public saloon, whose numbers were
growing rapidly in the generally
prosperous era immediately after the
Civil War. By 1873 Ohio sup-
ported as many as one such establishment
for every 150 or 200 people.
If one excludes women, children and
teetotaling men, then each saloon
catered to an average of only thirty
adult men.12
Temperance advocates in general, and
women in particular, held the
saloon to be a mortal threat to home and
hearth. Only a minority of
families were actually undermined by the
poverty or debauchery of
drunken husbands, but almost all women
felt threatened by the ag-
gressively male atmosphere of the saloon
and tavern. It represented
an alternative nexus of sociability,
separate from and often counter-
posed to, the circle of family,
relatives and friends over which women
traditionally presided. In a society in
which women were still economi-
cally and socially dependent on men,
these drinking establishments
eroded the traditional ways of life that
lent some dignity and stability
10. The best recent analyses of
"women's sphere" are found in Barbara J. Berg,
The Remembered Gate: Origins of
American Feminism: The Woman and the City,
1800-1860 (New York, 1978), 67-74, and Nancy Cott, The Bonds
of Womanhood:
"Womans Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New York, 1978), Jed Dannenbaum
analyzes this ideology in terms of the
temperance movement in his "Woman and Tem-
perance: The Years of Transition,
1850-1870," a paper delivered at the Conference on
the History of Women, St. Paul, October
1977.
11. Ida Husted Harper, The Life and
Work of Susan B. Anthony, I (Indianapolis,
1899), 64-66.
12. Whitaker, "Ohio WCTU,"
143.
Women's Temperance Crusade 399
to their social relationships.13 The
sudden panic of 1873, which left
rural areas and small towns in a
troubled condition, probably rein-
forced the sense of social disorder and
economic instability which
women already identified with the
growing saloon culture.
To many women, therefore, participation
in the post-Civil War
temperance movement took place on a
basis which did not funda-
mentally alter the ideology that held
women responsible for, and
confined to, home and family. Yet at the
same time, the activism
and larger public role that
characterized women's temperance work
in this era so broadened the narrow
definition of women's traditional
"sphere" as to make it, among
advanced women, an increasingly ana-
chronistic concept. Thus thirty women
were among the five hundred
men who attended the founding convention
of the National Prohibition
party in 1869. Women were accepted as
equal members of the Inde-
pendent Order of Good Templars, and
Martha Brown, later a founder
of the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, became a member of
the Templar executive board in 1867 and
Grand Chief Templar of
Ohio in 1872.14
The women's crusade represented a new
stage in this expansion of
the legitimate sphere of female
activity. Women now joined the tem-
perance movement in numbers that
eclipsed their participation in
any previous reform. In Hillsboro 200
women marched in a town
whose total population was less than
2,000. The village of Franklin
had fifty marching against the liquor
traffic out of 2,500. In Adrian,
Michigan, approximately 1,000 women out
of the city's population of
8,000 participated in some way. Bands of
150 women were sent out
daily over a period of several months.
Larger cities too felt the pull: in
Chicago that spring 14,000 Crusaders
petitioned the city council for
Sunday closing of saloons.15
For the most part these crusaders came
out of the upper ranks of
their town and village society. Mark
Twin characterized them as
young girls and women who are "not
the inferior sorts, but the very
13. Clark, Deliver Us From Evil, 1-9;
also see for example Susan B. Anthony's
address to the National American Woman
Suffrage Association 2 1875, in which
she emphasized the extent to which women
suffered from drunkenness. As reprinted
in Aileen Kraditor, Up From the
Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of Ameri-
can Feminism (Chicago, 1968), 159-61.
14. Whitaker, "Ohio WCTU,"
122-23; Frances Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds.,
A Woman of the Century, Fourteen
Hundred Seventy Biographicsl Sketches of Lead-
ing American Women (Buffalo, 1893), 127-28.
15. Whitaker, "Ohio WCTU,"
140; Minutes, Ladies Temperance Union of Adrian,
in Michigan Historical Collections of
the Bentley Library; Frances Willard, Presidential
Address, Minutes, 1889, 99, WCTU
National Headquarters Historical Files (joint Ohio
Historical Society-Michigan Historical
Collections-WCTU microfilm edition, roll 3).
400 OHIO HISTORY
best in their villages
communities."16 In a study of ninety-five of the
original Hillsboro Crusaders who could
be identified, Charles A.
Isetts has shown that these women were
"socially and economically
the dominant force in Hillsboro at that
time." All were from house-
holds headed by men who were either
skilled craftsmen or in white
collar occupations. These families were
also the wealthiest in town,
and over 90 percent of the Crusader
households were native white
Americans of two generations standing or
more. They were the "upper
crust of their society."17
As a consequence of their high social
standing and their sense of
righteous womanhood, these crusaders,
like other reformers of the
era, felt a keen sense of the justice of
their cause and their own moral
superiority. Although few of the women
participating in the 1874 cru-
sades favored so radical a demand as
suffrage, they did believe their
work in the best interests of the entire
society; this explains the self-
confidence and tactical militance
displayed by these otherwise conser-
vative women. They marched in the
streets, formed picket lines to
prevent the delivery of liquor to
saloons, took down the names of the
patrons, and organized and addressed
mass temperance meetings. Even
though they saw this work as in defense
of a traditionally defined
women's sphere, the radical and public
methods they subscribed to
represented a real, if only partially
conscious, commitment to the idea
that women could legitimately function
in the public realm. Their work
was that of an effective pressure group,
and in many instances they
succeeded in forcing a male-dominated
society to yield to their demands.18
A minority of the crusade leaders had
already been active in public
life, especially in women's missionary
societies and in Civil War agen-
cies such as the Sanitary Commission and
the Freedmen's Bureau. Eliza
Stewart, who led the Springfield, Ohio,
crusade had acquired exten-
sive leadership skills while working
with the Sanitary Commission.
Putting this experience to new use,
Stewart brought praying bands into
court rooms, organized mass meetings,
and eventually became a
prominent temperance lecturer whose
skill on the podium was hailed
16. Union Signal, June 4, 1885,
5.
17. Charles A. Isetts, "A Social
Profile of the Woman's Temperance Crusade:
Hillsboro, Ohio," unpublished
manuscript.
18. See Aileen Kraditor, "Ideology
of the Suffrage Movement," in Barbara Welter,
ed., The Woman Question in American
History (Hinsdale, IL, 1971), 88-89; Kraditor,
Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement,
45-56; and Gerda Lerner, "New
Approaches
to the Study of Women in American
History," Journal of Social History, III (Fall,
1969), 53-62. Lerner argues that even
without the vote, women effectively used pres-
sure tactics to force political change.
Many of their methods were later adopted by
civil rights and other groups.
Women's Temperance Crusade 401
in Great Britain as well as in the
United States.19
But most of the leadership of the
Crusade had had no previous ex-
perience in the public realm outside the
home. Of the thirty late nine-
teenth-century temperance leaders
singled out for formal portraits in
Frances Willard's Women and
Temperance (twenty of whom had
participated in the crusade) over
half-eighteen in all-had had no pre-
vious experience outside the domestic
sphere. In a score of states
women who had previously led quiet
lives, who had always appeared
shy and subservient to their husbands,
were suddenly organizing, taking
to the streets, getting locked into
airless, smelly saloons, risking arrest
and generally behaving as if nothing in
their lives counted except their
dedication to the temperance movement.20
For example, Mary Wood-
bridge, mother of three by the time she
was twenty, had previously
devoted herself exclusively to her
family. When the Crusade came to
Ravenna, Ohio, she became overnight a
talented, moving speaker in the
evangelistic style. Within months
Woodbridge was in constant demand
as a platform lecturer, and in 1879 she
became president of the Ohio
WCTU.21
Eliza Thompson, who led the Hillsboro
Crusade, was the daugh-
ter of a governor, wife of a judge, and
a conservatively inclined house-
wife and mother. She reported that as
she first rose to speak "my
limbs refused to bear me," but when
the men who were present
left the room her strength returned.22 Although she long retained a
sense of public reticence, Thompson
nevertheless plunged into cru-
sade work in Ohio. In later years she
addressed audiences of hun-
dreds from public platforms as a WCTU
speaker. Another crusader
who moved quickly into public life was
Amy Fisher Leavitt, wife of a
Baptist minister, who joined the
movement when it was organized in
Cincinnati. There the police arrested
her briefly while she prayed on
the sidewalk in front of a saloon. As
the wife of a minister Leavitt
may have had previous experience in
leading prayer meetings, but she
had never before run afoul of the law.
However, she took incarcera-
tion in stride and later continued her
prayers and hymns for the bene-
fit of the inmates of the jail.23
19. Frances Willard, ed., Women and
Temperance (Hartford, 1883), 83-85.
20. Ibid. Of the ten temperance
leaders who did not participate in the crusade,
three were not Americans, three happened
to be abroad when the crusade took place,
and four were from areas of the
country-New England and the South-where few crusades
took places.
21. Ibid., 103-06. Also see
Scrapbook number 7, WCTU microfilm series, roll 30,
frame 405.
22. Thompson, Crusade Sketches, 61.
23. Willard, Women and Temperance, 28.
402 OHIO HISTORY |
|
The first-hand accounts of the Crusade cannot be read without feel- ing the excitement experienced by these women and their growing conviction that anything was now possible. The women themselves saw the Crusade as a watershed, an experience that changed their self-conception. They articulated these feelings at Woman's Christian Temperance Union conventions and whenever and wherever they gathered for the rest of their lives. An editorial in the Union Signal in 1889 asserted that the Crusade "meant a revolution in women's work and in thousands of women's lives." Eliza Stewart, writing in the same issue of the Signal, said as a result of the Crusade, women "who had not dreamed they held such rich gifts in their keeping, were found on pulpits and rostrums with burning words swaying great audiences." Mary Burt, later president of the New York State WCTU described how she made her first public expression in the form of a note to a Crusade leader, during the marches in Auburn, New York. She was soon giv- ing a public lecture.24 The Crusade had an emotional impact upon women participants equivalent to a conversion experience. It moved them toward feminist principles, even if they did not recognize them as such. Aileen Kradi- tor has suggested that the aims of the feminists, while they varied widely in terms of specific demands, in the last analysis can be sum-
24. Union Signal, December 2, 1889, 5-9. |
Women's Temperance Crusade 403
marized as the demand for autonomy.25
Certainly these crusaders
shared this perception. They saw their
movement as trying to change
an aspect of society which directly
affected them as women, and they
felt they had a right to work publicly
in the cause.
Later the crusaders interpreted their
participation as part of a pro-
cess that helped them realize their true
potential as women for the
first time. On its tenth anniversary in
1883, the WCTU commemo-
rated the Crusade at length. WCTU
suffragist Mary Livermore, argued
that the advancement the Crusade gave to
temperance was far less
important than the movement's effect in
unifying women, giving them
moral courage and teaching them the
power of association. WCTU
president Frances Willard thought the
Crusade "taught women their
power to transact business, to mold
public opinion by public utter-
ance, and opened the eyes of scores and
hundreds of women to the
need of the Republic for the suffrage of
women and made them willing
to take up for their homes and country's
sake the burdens of that citi-
zenship they would never have sought for
their own."26
In response to the Union Signal's query,
"What has the Crusade
done for you?" anonymous
rank-and-file crusaders adopted much
the same perspective as leaders
Livermore and Willard. They expressed
the crusade's meaning to them in terms
of personal growth and develop-
ment. It "started me into an active
thinking life"; it gave me "broader
views of woman's sphere and
responsibility" reported two participants.
One said that because of the crusade she
"developed a new and grander
purpose." Another recalled that the
crusade "opened doors of opportu-
nity and tender-hearted
fellowship." Still another wrote to the paper that
the Crusade "brought me from the
retirement of my home into public
work." Finally, reported one
participant, "the Crusade taught women
to do noble deeds, not dream them."27
In effect, answered these middle-
class, church-going women, ten years
after the event, the Woman's
Temperance Crusade of 1874 had raised
their consciousness.
As the country's largest and most
influential nineteenth-century
women's organization, the WCTU reflected
the new level at which
women now sought to participate in
public life. Founded in 1874 as
the institutional expression of the
energies unleashed by the Crusade,
the WCTU grew to more than 150,000 dues
paying members by 1893.
Its strength remained substantial in the
Midwest, but the WCTU
25. Kraditor, Up From the Pedestal,
7-9.
26. Union Signal, December 20,
1883, 3; Mary Earhart, Frances Willard, From
Prayer to Politics (Chicago, 1944), 143; see also Frances Willard's
introduction to
Wittenmeyer's Crusade History, 15-21.
27. Union Signal, December 20,
1883, 12.
404 OHIO
HISTORY
had chapters in every state and major
city in the nation. Like the
temperance crusaders of 1873 and 1874,
the WCTU's staunch defense
of home and family appealed to the
conservative instincts of middle-
class women, but the Union so
dramatically broadened the arena in
which to carry out this program as to
virtually shatter for thousands
the traditional bonds of womenhood.
Under Frances Willard's apt
slogan "Do Everything," the
WCTU endorsed women's suffrage by
1883 and came out for a staggering array
of other reforms. In addition
to prohibition, the WCTU supported
research into the causes of alco-
holism, established kindergartens, paid
the salary of municipal police
matrons and aligned itself with the
farmer and labor insurgencies of
the 1880s and 1890s.28
More than any other single event in
nineteenth-century American
history, the Woman's Temperance Crusade
touched the lives of tens
of thousands of women and legitimized
for them a new and expanded
role in civil life. It took women out of
the home, taught them to con-
front social problems directly, and
showed them there were ways to
make an impact on society even without
the vote. In practice, if not
always in terms of formal ideology, the
Crusade helped subvert the
nineteenth-century idea that women
function in a sphere separate
from that of men and narrowly confined
to home, family and religion.
As Mary Livermore later put it:
"That phenomenal and exceptional
rising of women in Southern Ohio ten
years ago floated them to a
higher level of womenhood. It lifted
them out of a subject condi-
tion . . . to a plateau where they saw
that endurance had ceased
to be a virtue."29 They
had experienced their baptism of power and
liberty.
28. Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic
Crusade: Status Politics and the American Tem-
perance Movement (Urbana, 1963), 76-79; for a description of the way in
which the
WCTU's home-based ideology introduced
heretofore conservative women to extra-
domestic, even feminist, concerns, see
Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From
Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970), chapter 6; Ellen DuBois provides an
excellent analysis of the relationship
between the suffrage movement and the WCTU
in "The Radicalism of the Woman
Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Recon-
struction of Nineteenth-Century
Feminism," Feminist Studies, I (1975), 63-71.
29. Union Signal, June 4, 1885, 5.
RUTH BORDIN
"A Baptism of Power and Liberty"
The Women's Crusade of 1873-1874
Throughout the winter of 1873 and 1874
a grass roots women's tem-
perance crusade swept through Ohio, the
Midwest and parts of the
East. Thousands of women marched in the
streets, prayed in saloons
and organized their own temperance
societies in hundreds of towns
and cities of the American heartland.
The Crusade had an immense
impact on these women. Cut loose from
the quiescence and public
timidity that was their prescribed role,
the Crusade gave to many
American women a new sense of identity,
a taste of collective power
and an acquaintance with the larger
world of the public platform.
"We have had no wonderful crusade
in England" observed the promi-
nent British temperance worker Margaret
Parker to her American sis-
ters, a decade later, "no such
baptism of power and liberty." Parker
reported that unlike their American
sisters, English women still be-
lieved that "woman's voice should
only be heard within the four walls
of her own home."1
Parker correctly saw the Crusade as a
watershed in the participa-
tion of American women in the temperance
movement. Before the
Crusade of 1873-1874, American women
(much like their British
counterparts) played a relatively minor
and passive role, but for twen-
ty-five years afterwards, until the
growth of the Anti-Saloom League
at the turn of the century, women
provided the major and most crea-
tive leadership for the temperance
movement. Their organization,
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU), organized as a
Ruth Bordin is currently a lecturer in
the history department at Eastern Michigan Uni-
versity and previously served for ten
years as Curator of Manuscripts at the Michigan
Historical Collections, University of
Michigan. Another version of this paper was pre-
sented at the Conference on the History
of Women, St. Catherine's College, in October
1977.
1. Union Signal, December 20, 1883, 6. Temperance and Prohibition
Papers, Na-
tional Headquarters file, WCTU (joint
Ohio Historical Society-Michigan Historical Col-
lections-WCTU microfilm edition, Union
Signal series, roll 1) (hereafter cited as Union
Signal). Margaret Parker was a Scots woman who served as
president of the first inter-
national Woman's Christian Temperance
Union in 1876.