What role women had in the temperance movement?

Question

what was the emergences of tempearance as a major issue in the 1840 and 1850s? what was the role of women in temperance movement?

Answer 1

Women were enormously influential in the Temperence movement, it was an issue of major concern to women in the second half of the 19th century.  Far more women were involved in the temperence movement than in the women's suffrage movement, until women temperance crusaders realised that they might have a better chance of getting Prohibition made law if they had the vote, so they joined in with the Suffragette movement.

In 'America's women' Gail collins writes:

'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 startk - 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 tot he saloons in Hillsboro, Ohio, demanding that they close forever.  The demonsrations went on for months, attracting national attention.  A reporter from Cincinnati intervewed a Hillsboro man who said he and his friends walked into a bar and ordered drinks when "the rustle of women's wear attracted their attention, and looking up they saw what they thought was a crowd of a thousand ladies entering."  One of the horrified men saw his mother and sister, an other his future mother-in-law.  Soon, women in small towns all over Ohio were kneeling in the snow before the town tavern, singing hymns and sometimes taking an ax to the bartender's wares.  Seemingly spontaneous assaults on saloons - which were in fact frequently urged on by male tempereance 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 antialcahol crusade by America's middle-class women that would continue until Prohibition became the law of the land in 1919.

The ultimate symbol of saloon-smashing was Carrie Nation, who first drew national attention in 1900 when she walked into the rather elegant bar of the Hotel Carey in Witchita, Kansans, and threw two stones at a huge nude painting of Cleopatra at the BAth,  ripping the canvas.  She shattered a $1,500 mirror, drove the patrons from the room with her cane, and broke all the bottles and glasses on the bar.  Her second husband left her when she became  a celebrity, and she embarked on a career of lecturing, smashing and publishing magazines like The Hatchet and The Smasher's Mail.  She also inspired imitators like May Sheriff, who organized the "flying squadron of Jesus" fifty women who raied bars along the Oklahoma border.

Natipn was not a temperence leader - she was part of the lunatic fringe.  But millions of mild-mannered American women defended her ends, if not necessarily her means.  They distributed literature that chronicled the terrible fate that befell doubters who rebelled in even the smallest way against the antialcahol creed (In one story, a farmer insisted on using a few barrels of apples to make hard cider.  His brilliant son sampled the drink and swiftly turned into a hopeless inebriate).  Women urged their sons to sign tempereance pledges and raised their daughters to regard a man who drank as the worst possible candidate for a husband.  The discovery that a suitor indulged even occasionally was enough to break off a relationship. "Lips that touch alcahol shall never touch mine" went the mantra of the day.

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 temperance 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 liquour.  They became critical grassroots soldiers for the suffrage movement, organizing all those petition drives and referenda campaigns and state lobbying that kep the effort going during the doldrums and gradually pushed it forward to success.

The woman wh 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 reformt he country than most of her followers.  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 from world peace to public health, and one of the most active was the section devoted to woman suffrage.  In many small towns,, the WCTU was the centre of all feminine political activity.'

Answer 2

Check out the following sites.  Women played a major role in the temperance movement.