Ohio History Journal

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.

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.

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.