Maine adopted the first statewide prohibition in 1851, and over the next four years twelve other states across the Northeast and the Midwest followed suit. The porous enforcement of these so-called Maine Laws meant that they failed to put the liquor trade out of business. The poor results led many voters and state legislators to reconsider prohibition laws.
But with the close of the Civil War, the temperance movement gave prohibition a new life. In 1869, the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT), whose ranks had boomed to several hundred thousand members, provided the base for the founding of the Prohibition Party dedicated to government action against the liquor trade. During the late 1870s, the IOGT and the WCTU would forge a functioning alliance behind prohibition. But by this time, the IOGT had lost much of its momentum as the WCTU arose as the country’s most powerful temperance organization.
The WCTU, however, was unlike any previous temperance organization because it was also the nation’s largest organization of women. The Washingtonians had their female Martha Washingtonian auxiliaries. The IOGT accepted women on at least a nominally equal footing, permitting women to speak in meetings and hold office, although one IOGT member would recall that women’s role was “to be seen, not heard.” In the WCTU, by contrast, women were the only voting members and officeholders.
By 1890, with some 150,000 dues-paying members, the WCTU had more than ten times the membership of the largest women’s suffrage organization of the day, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and more than seven times the membership of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
The WCTU was by far the biggest and most influential women’s organization of the post–Civil War decades. Here it needs to be noted that the Protestant churches had more women members, and their female foreign mission societies might have been larger than the WCTU. But the WCTU was an autonomous, ecumenical, and political association in a way that the Methodist Home Missionary Society, for example, was not. At the same time, the WCTU took on a missionary role and had ties with the churches. Most members of the WCTU also belonged to one or another of the Protestant denominations, and they used their church connections and networks to build their organization.
Yet the autonomy of the WCTU was one of its most significant features: it guarded its independence from the churches and brought women together across denominational boundaries. With an eye to ecumenical equality, every WCTU organization from the top down had vice presidents from each of the denominations of their members. A small union in Londonderry, Pennsylvania, for example, appointed a Presbyterian, a Quaker, and a Methodist as vice presidents. Among their responsibilities, the vice presidents cultivated ties with their churches, which was not always a simple proposition given that some church leaders disagreed with prohibition and still others disapproved of an organization of women taking part in politics.