Can you explain the basic issues surrounding the women's temperance movement?

Question

Why was ‘Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard’ the first woman represented among America’s greatest leaders in Statuary Hall?

Answer 1

In 'America's Women' Gail collins writes:

'Despite all the publicity the suffrage movement recieved, most women who became involved in public affairs between the Civil War and World War I were not all that interested in the right to vote.  They were concerned with temperence.  The liquor industry was right - many women wanted to vote just so they could use the ballot box to ban the sale of alcahol.

Drinking was the nation's biggest consumer industry, and alcahol consumption was at one of its highest levels in history.  Most americans were actually abstainers, but the others were drinking overtime.  The kind of women who joined reform movements did not drink at all, and they often made it uncomfortable for anyone else he did.  An American gentleman, a visitor commented "thinks it ungallant to drink anything stronger than water in a lady's company." Temperence represented women's desire to keep their men at home, and their dedication to that great American middle-class virtue of self-control.  It also spoke to fear of a changing world populated by foreign people with strange ways.  Immigrants - even many immigrant women - drank.  Turning them into abstainers made them less threatening and more American.  It was the same impulse that compelled early social workers to urge immigrant women to stop cooking strange dishes like pasta and take up patriotic fare like roast meats and potatoes.

Before the Civil War, temperence movements had all been led by men, and the goal was usually to reform drunkards - moderation was the byword, and some reformers simply asked members to drink nothing stronger than wine.  But in the 1870s, opposition to liquor emerged as a woman's issue, and the goal became more stark - to shut down saloons and drive all forms of alcaholic beverage out of the country.

In 1873, just before christmas, about eighty married women marched up to the saloons in Hillsboro, Ohio, demanding that they close forever.  The demonstrations went on for months, attracting national attention.  Soon, women in small towns all over Ohio were kneeling in the snow before the town tavern, singings hymns and sometimes taking an axe to the bartender's wares.  Seemingly spontaneous assaults on saloons - which were in fact frequently urged on by male temperence lecturers - occured in nearly 1,000 communities, involving tens of thousands of women over a period of about six months.  It was the start of an anti-alcahol crusade by America's middle-class women that would continue until Prohibition became the law of the land in 1919.

Temperence advocates could be mind-bogglingly self-righteous, and they tended to blame alcahol for everything bad except the weather (Frances Perkins, who would become secretary of labor in Franklin Roosevelt's administration, recalled that as a student at Mount Holyoke, she visited a poor mill town and was stunned that some of the impoverished residents didn't drink.  It had never occured to her that anything but alcahol caused poverty.)  Nevertheless, they were talking about a genuine social issue that ruined the lives of a great many American women.  A drunken husband was an emotional burden, a potential physical danger, and a drain on the family finances.  With little control over her property or her children's custody, a woman who had the bad luck to pick a husband with an alcahol problem could do little but watch and worry - unless she came to the end of her rope and grabbed a hatched and marched to the nearest saloon.

The Women's christian Temperence Union became the biggest mass political organization of American women in history.  In the 1890s, ten times as many New York women were in the WCTU as in all the suffrage groups combined.  Tampa alone had three different women's temperence organizations (one for blacks, one for whites, and one for Cuban Americans), but Florida's suffrage group had only twenty members in the whole state, eight of them men.  However, all those temperence women gradually began to feel that having the vote would be a very good thing because it held the key to the prohibition of liquor.  They became critical grassroots soldiers for the suffrage movement, organizing all those petition drives and referenda campaigns and state lobbying efforts that kept the effort going during the doldrums and gradually pushed it forward towards success.

The woman who brought these two very different political drives together was Frances Willard, the president of the WCTU for twenty years, and a leader with a far more sweeping vision of how women could reform the country than most of her followers.  She was one of the best-known people of her era, and she was certainly the most famous woman of the nineteenth century whose name is virtually unknown today.  Willard was the head of the Ladies College at Northwestern University when her former fiancee, whom she had rejected, was named university president.  It became clear that she needed to find another life's work.  She began making speeches at temperence meetings and then, impelled by what she believed was divine guidance, committed herself to the cause.  She toured the country from 1874 to 1883, averaging a lecture a day, staying with local townspeople, attempting to support her mother with the donations she collected.  In one eighty-day period, she delivered forty speeches and wrote 2,000 letters.

Willard had a genius for building a mass movement by finding common ground for compromise.  She initiated a policy called "Do Everything" in which the members were encouraged to fight for reform in whatever way struck them as best.  The national headquarters had dozens of departments, dedicated to everything fromworld peace to public health, and one of the most active was the section devoted to women's suffrage.  In many small towns, the WCTU was the centre of all feminine political activity.  Everett Hughes, a Chicago sociologist, remembered the WCTU gatherings his mother hosted, in which the women talked about "general sanitation and improved education, about the child labor laws".

Willard became the nation's most prominent orator, but far from the best paid.  Her trips were organised in the cheapest way possible, including overnight rides, slwo freights, and even trips in the caboose, one of which took five and a half hours to cover thirty-six miles.  She was troubled by ill health, and when she collapsed in February 1898, she went into a rapid decline, during which she was politician enough to call in a sympathetic reporter for a final interview.  thirty thousand people walked past her bier in one day.  Crowds stood for hours to see her coffine.  In 1905, Illinois chose her to represent the state in Statutary Hall in the nation's Capital, calling her "The first woman of the nineteenth century, the most beloved character of her time." '

Answer 2

Add to the fine history above some of the reasons for starting a Temperance movement.

Alcohol, back then as is still today, is still an addictive drug that changes people's personalities and physical control with each successive drink. Families for centures have been torn apart by one or more family member being an alcoholic. Money needed for food, clothing, and rent is spent on alcohol by the drinker. Children go without clothes and food as the alcoholic spends all money and time drinking alcohol. Alcoholics lose their jobs and income, forcing mothers with children out of good, decent housing and into slums because of loss of income for rent.

Add to the financial woes the physical abuse of women and children of alcoholics. Alcoholics can be belligerent to the point of abusive over the most unreasonable causes at the drop of a hat. Women and children the world over today still suffer at the hands of an abusive alcoholic.

Temperance movements were started to combat the disease of alcoholism and its consequences. In the 1890's-1940's, alcoholism and it's consequences put millions of women and children living in abject poverty, living in slums and creating vicious cycles of poverty that still are perpetuated to this day.

Answer 3

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is the oldest continuing non-sectarian women's organization worldwide. Founded in Fredonia, New York in 1873, the group spearheaded the crusade for prohibition. Members advanced their cause by entering saloons, singing, praying, and urging saloonkeepers to stop selling alcohol. Subsequently, on December 22, 1873, they were the first local organization to adopt the name, Women's Christian Temperance Union.

She was born to a schoolteacher in Churchville, New York but spent most of her childhood in Janesville, Wisconsin. She moved to Evanston, Illinois when she was 18.

Willard was elected president of the United States Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1879, a position which she held for life. She created the Formed Worldwide W.C.T.U. in 1883, and was elected its president in 1888[citation needed].

She founded the magazine The Union Signal, and was its editor from 1892 through 1898.

Her tireless efforts for women's suffrage and prohibition included a fifty-day speaking tour in 1874, an average of 30,000 miles of travel a year, and an average of four hundred lectures a year for a ten year period, mostly with her longtime companion Anna Adams Gordon. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (Women Suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution.

She wrote Woman and Temperance, Nineteen Beautiful Years, A Great Mother, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (1889), and the popular bestseller, A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895), as well as large number of magazine articles.

Willard was the first woman represented among the illustrious company of America’s greatest leaders in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. She was national president of Alpha Phi in 1887, and the first dean of women at Northwestern University. In her later years, Willard became a committed socialist. She died of influenza at the Empire Hotel in New York City while preparing to set sail for a visit to England.

She was publicly honored many times during her life by persons of prominence in government and society in many lands. Carrie Chapman Catt, Pi Beta Phi, said of her, "There has never been a woman leader in this country greater than nor perhaps so great as Frances Willard." She was called the "best loved woman in America".[citation needed] and her close friend, John Greenleaf Whittier, called her "the noblest woman of her age" in 1888

Answer 4

Temperance in many ways was about keeping the social fabric together, people had been getting around in an alcohol fog for centuries, partly to deal with pain, hunger, cold and poor living conditions.  Temperance was not just a christian thing.  It was about protecting families from violence but also about getting the population into a position where they could learn the skills needed for the new industrial economy and perform competently in it.  Am not familiar with American history  so I don't know about that part of your question.  Men were also active in the temperance movement and it was linked to other movements such as unionism and women's sufferage.

Answer 5

The promotion of not drinking