The Progressive Era

The Anti-Saloon League successfully combined propaganda, religion, and political coercion to make alcohol a wedge issue in elections.

Frances Willard was a pioneer in women's education and a champion of women's rights. In 1879, she took the reins of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She forged an alliance between the WCTU and the women's suffrage movement. Willard appointed Mary Hanchett Hunt in charge of the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, an arm of the WCTU that worked to push anti-alcohol indoctrination in the public schools. Learning Objective: Students will know who were the women behind the Prohibition movement.

View images of reformer Carrie Nation and other reformers of the prohibition era. From 1920-1933, the United States was a dry country. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the making, transportation, and sale of alcohol. The amendment grew out of the pervasive alcohol abuse, especially among men and immigrant populations, of the 19th century. Women had few legal rights, and their lives were often ruined from dealing with alcoholic and abusive spouses. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League grew out of concern for the rights of women and children, and both organizations pushed for the 18th amendment. Learning Objective: Students will analyze how women were the driving force behind the Temperance movement and helped get the 18th Amendment passed.

Carry Nation was the president of her local Kansas chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She vandalized saloons across Kansas in 1900, smashing them up with a hatchet.

In 1840, six hard-drinking friends in Baltimore swore to never drink again and established a society of reformed drunkards. The country had entered a new era of reform. Temperance movements would eventually insist on complete abstinence from all forms of alcohol. Church-based organizations embraced reform, as well as the women's suffrage movement.

Wayne Wheeler, the superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, was the most powerful man in Washington, D.C.