[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to this weekend post on the influential organization launched by that 1874 convention!]
Six impressive
women who together reflect the evolution of a successful and still-active
organization.
1)
Matilda
Gilruth Carpenter: No national organization springs to life without more
local efforts on which it’s building, and that was certainly the case for the
WCTU, which in many ways began in central Ohio in late
December, 1873. It was there that a reformer and religious leader named Matilda
Gilruth Carpenter spearheaded an effort to close saloons, calling her community
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the process. The book
she authored a couple decades later about those experiences is one layer to
her legacy, but the national organization that met in her native Ohio about a
year later is certainly another.
2)
Annie
Turner Wittenmyer: By the time she was elected as the WCTU’s first
president at that 1874 convention, Annie Turner Wittenmyer had been a prominent
activist for at least a decade, most especially through her Civil War-era
efforts with Soldiers’ Aid Societies, Sanitary Commissions, and dietary
reforms. But Wittenmyer’s activism made an effort to be as apolitical, or at
least non-partisan,
as possible, and she frequently fought with other WCTU leaders over whether the
organization should address (much less support) women’s suffrage. Which is why in
1879 she lost the presidency to…
3)
Frances Willard:
Willard was a groundbreaking educator who also became one of the late 19th
century’s most impassioned and effective feminist activists, and she saw the WCTU
as very much part of the overall women’s movement, rather than solely or even
centrally a temperance organization. In her 19
years as WCTU President (a term ended only when she passed away in 1898)
she pushed the organization to fight for not only suffrage, but also many other
social reforms, including equal pay for equal work, uniform divorce laws, and
free kindergarten. She also founded the World’s
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to make these efforts truly global.
4)
Bessie Laythe Scovell:
Think globally, act locally isn’t a new idea, though, and some of the most
successful WCTU efforts took place in state chapters. Probably the most
prominent and effective of those state chapters was the Minnesota WCTU, which
was founded in 1877; Scovell didn’t become its president until 1897, so its
efforts were well established by then, but she became a particularly important
symbol of this chapter’s groundbreaking work, especially among immigrant
communities in the state. In that hyperlinked “President’s Address,” delivered
at the Minnesota WCTU’s 24th Annual Meeting in 1900, Scovell lays
out her holistic and progressive vision for the organization and how it could
become better connected to immigrant communities through linguistic and
cultural solidarity.
5)
Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper and Eliza
Pierce: Such local efforts certainly helped advance the WCTU’s cause, but even
more important were the leaders of color who could help make the organization
more truly representative of the American population. That included Harper, the
African
American poet, novelist, educator, and activist who led the WCTU’s “Department
of Work Among the Colored People”; and Pierce, the Iroquois Native
American activist who started a new New York chapter and extended the WCTU
to Six Nations communities throughout the state. As with all the temperance
histories I’ve highlighted this week, the WCTU’s was complex and could feature
exclusionary attitudes to be sure; but women like Harper and Pierce helped make
sure it likewise featured inclusive possibilities.
Thanksgiving
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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