Feminism and Temperance Reform in the Boulder WCTU

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) developed out of the general reform movement gaining momentum in America's post-Civil War period. This movement was in part a reassertion of Protestant-Puritan values such as temperance, honesty, order, and Christian mission in a society apparently threatened by an increasingly Catholic, immigrant population.[1] In part, too, it was a reaction to a shift in influence away from native, middle-class Protestant small town leaders to new monied elites arising out of urbanization and industrialization.[2]But for the middle-class women who joined the WCTU, organized reform was more than a way to uphold Puritan values and affirm class status. It was also a means for expanding woman's domestic role in an atmosphere of community approval and mutual support. The Boulder, Colorado, WCTU organized in 1881 nearly eight years after the first union, in Fredonia, New York, formed. Growing in vigor over the next four decades, it undertook a broad program of social reform, the prohibition of beverage alcohol being a leading goal among many.[3] Inseparable from the reforms the Boulder Union pursued were underlying objectives to raise the status of women and extend their autonomy both within and beyond the home. As revealed in the minutes of the Boulder WCTU, these feminist aspirations took many forms, but basically they fell into two categories. One was directed at controlling male freedom, and except for the campaign to prohibit alcohol (seen as a vice of adult males) was primarily concerned with molding the behavior of boys and young men. The other promoted an expanded identity for women through the glorification of motherhood as the platform from which reform efforts were launched. This mothering of society I have labeled in all its aspects maternalism. Linked with patriotism through the child as future citizen, maternalism advanced the concept of female moral superiority and legitimized political action

Autonomy · Economic history · Fell · Geography · Middle class · Paternalism · Political science · Population · Protestantism · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law

• The Cult of True Womanhood

  Open Access•Barbara Welter•American Quarterly•1966

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