Fighting For a Voice

Tired of being America’s second class citizens women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries joined in the fight to demand increased government involvement that would give women more rights. By being the radical voice of prohibition, Francis Willard propelled this fight onward by pushing women’s issues into the political arena. Organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) were influential forces fighting for improved working conditions of women by letting America know that unfavorable working conditions were faced not only by men but also by women. The battle for suffrage was long and strenuous, but women never gave up because as Susan B. Anthony said in 1906, “failure is impossible.” As people and ideas poured into the United States, women formed cross ethnic and class organizations to improve their rights by fighting for prohibition, labor reform, and suffrage which led to a more responsive and powerful government.

Prohibition provided women a means of advocating for a more responsive government by expressing animosity toward their perceived inferiority and toward foreigners. The Woman’s Crusades of 1873-1874, in which 100,000 women went to saloons demanding a cease in the sale of alcohol, brought about the formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874 that campaigned for the abolishment of legal drinking to protect women and children from the abusive husband and father. Upon becoming president of the WCTU in 1879, Francis Willard moved the WCTU from a religious to political perspective by redefining “Alcoholism as a disease rather than a sin, and poverty as a cause rather than a result of drink.” Globalization influenced this view because the majority of those afflic...

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...began at a local level but through radicalism and the “winning plan” it soon progressed to a nationwide phenomenon that led to the nineteenth amendment. By demanding more rights and government involvement, women were bringing an end to the era where they were considered second class citizens.

Works Cited

James L. Roark et al., The American Promise, Value Edition, Volume II: From 1865: A History of the United States, (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), 563, 628.

Ibid., 628.

Ibid., 652-654.

Ibid., 630.

Ibid., 628.

Ibid., 563, 628, 652.

Ibid., 562-563.

Ibid., 629.

Ibid., 652.

Ibid., 699.

Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 66-70.

Roark et al., The American Promise, 652.

Ibid., 654.

Ibid., 653

Ibid., 653-654.

Ibid., 629

Ibid., 629-630.

Ibid., 678-679.

Ibid., 701.

Ibid., 679.