In the late 1800s an organization called the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union or WCTU pushed for two big causes:
an end to the use of alcohol, which is called temperance, and woman suffrage.
It might seem weird for these things to be linked but for many activists the
connection was obvious. For one thing, Americans in the 1800s
drank more alcohol than we do today and it led to real social problems. WCTU
members argued that because women had so little
economic and political power, they were especially vulnerable to poverty and
abuse if men in their families were alcoholics.
WCTU leaders like Frances Willard and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
argued that the way to break the power of the liquor traffic
was for women to win the right to vote and enact alcohol prohibition and other
reforms to protect the home. The WCTU endorsed suffrage in 1881 when
many people still thought of women voting as outlandishly radical.
Its tens of thousands of members would form the grassroots of a suffrage
movement for many years to come.