Paving the way to suffrage through temperance

When thinking about early strides for women’s rights, many people imagine suffragettes marching on Washington, D.C., and later earning the right to vote. But according to Suffolk County Community College professor Danielle DiMauro, few people know the road to suffrage had early help from women coming together to fight against alcohol.

DiMauro spoke about how advocates of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who fought against the consumption and sale of alcohol in the late 19th century, were among the first groups of women to organize and protest publicly in American History, during a lecture at the Connetquot Public Library on March 9.

“[Prohibition] is kind of a double-edged sword,” DiMauro said. “Looking at prohibition, I often will talk to my students [about] it being a failure. But in certain aspects, it wasn’t a failure, in the sense that it gave women a greater role and being out in public life, and even though, in the end, we know what the end result was [prohibition’s repeal], it also paved the way for women to get the right to vote.”

According to DiMauro, before movements like the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, women were seen in society as homebound and family providers—not as changemakers. But over the span of decades, through grassroots organizing, pro-prohibition women’s groups became the first outlet for women to express their views and organize for change en masse in public.

Founded in 1874 and initially led by president Annie Wittenmyer, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union organized women and families across the country to stop the consumption and sale of alcohol through moral and religious pleas.

While for many today, prohibition seems unthinkable, for Victorian-era advocates, it was a public health issue, DiMauro explained. As the industrial revolution brought men in the United Kingdom, and later the U.S., into factories for long hours, those men would often unwind at bars after work to destress, leading many to waste countless hours and their life’s savings on drinking, leaving their wives and children without money or a father.

To combat what they saw as a public health crisis, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union organized women to encourage establishments and municipalities to ban the sale of alcohol. In the group’s early years, advocates spread their message by knocking on doors and having neighbors and store owners sign pledges not to drink alcohol, but that unbinding principle wasn’t enough for some organizers, DiMauro explained.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s second president, Frances Willard, changed the game when it came to organizing by taking up the moral crusade against alcohol through posters, songs, demonstrations, newspapers, and more.

Under Willard’s leadership, the temperance union gained traction through propaganda like cartoons depicting women saving men at the saloon by pumping their stomachs with water instead of ale, or cartoons of themselves proudly displaying their motto, “For god, and home, and native land.”

Other propaganda outlets included songs like “Father’s A Drunkard and Mother Is Dead,” which DiMauro played during the lecture. With lyrics talking about how the father’s rum habits caused the family to starve, all with a church-like chorus in the background, temperance advocates played hard on the emotions.

The organization’s explicit religiosity helped give the group legitimacy for many people in society who still felt women should stay homebound, DiMauro explained.

And during the late 19th century, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union also spread its message through chapters across the country, in print, through newspapers like Our Union Signal, and in columns in local newspapers like The Suffolk County News.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Sayville chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union published its own column in The Suffolk County News, with its motto front and center, talking about the latest happenings within the group.

In a December 1888 article, motions passed during a recent Suffolk County Temperance Society meeting are noted. “It is resolved: 1st. That we seek the blessing of God upon our attempts to destroy the evils of intemperance.” 2nd. That this evil ought to be opposed by all moral and Christian men,” the column went on to say.

While the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which instated prohibition, was a failure to many, causing even more issues with bootlegging and crime, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and its thousands of followers helped organize women to later pass the next amendment, the 19th, giving women the right to vote, DiMauro said.

“The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum,” said Willard, and repeated by DiMauro during her
lecture.