The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was the first mass organization among women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity."
It's hard to imaginate the world from the 1870's -1930's but that span in time, thankfully gone-bye, has some uncanny and twisted applications in social reforms from the 1960's to now.
Prohibition that started on January 16, 1919 and lasted for almost 34 years until the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was repealed on December 5, 1933
Good intentions with unintended consequences? And it took more than three decades. Things don't move much faster than that now. But there was relatively recently an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution that created some furor; nonetheless it became "the law of the land". Let's get back to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union with all the agitation it created to change "social customs".
The National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in November of 1874. It grew out of the "Woman's Crusade" of the winter of 1873-1874. Initial groups in Fredonia, New York and Hillsboro and Washington Court House, Ohio, after listening to a lecture by Dr. Dio Lewis, were moved to a non-violent protest against the dangers of alcohol. Normally quiet housewives dropped to their knees in pray-ins in local saloons and demanded that the sale of liquor be stopped. In three months the women had driven liquor out of 250 communities, and for the first time felt what could be accomplished by standing together . . .
Looking deeper into the status quo at that time: "The crusade against alcohol was a protest by women, in part, of their lack of civil rights.
Rights we all have that needed to get protected by the force of enacting and enforcing laws.
Does that sound very current and familiar, or what?
Things that immediately to mind: voting rights, reproductive rights, the exercise of religion in private and public places [like your own bedroom or public bathrooms], gender orientation and marriage equality, housing discrimination, economic status, and disabilities.
Women could not vote.
In most states women could not have control of their property or custody of their children in case of divorce.
There were no legal protections for women and children, prosecutions for rape were rare, and the state-regulated "age of consent" was as low as seven.
We've come a long way for sure, but there is now shocking metrics and data from those earlier times: Most local political meetings were held in saloons from which women were excluded. At the end of the 19th century Americans spent over a billion dollars on alcoholic beverages each year, compared with $900 million on meat, and less than $200 million on public education.
In 1879, Frances Willard became president of the WCTU and turned to organizing political means in addition to moral persuasion to achieve total abstinence [much like the abstinence pledge for pre-marital sex].
Willard's personal motto was "do everything."
The WCTU adopted this as a policy which came to mean that all reform was inter-connected and that social problems could not be separated.
. . . and so it goes
Much like the so-called "Unity Pledge" promoted by the City of Mesa that has instead divided interest-groups, certain fundamental rights are best handled by the power and enforcement of laws.
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