Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

Many organizations were founded to promote temperance. The longest surviving group is the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which was launched in 1874. Its origins date back to the 1840s, when Delecta Barbour Lewis and other women began to pray for liquor dealers to close down in their town of Auburn, New York. This incident was remembered by her son, Diocletian Lewis, a homeopathic doctor and temperance crusader. Lewis was a fiery speaker, and he cited his mother’s example in a speech on 13 December 1873 in Freedonia, New York. He encouraged women to organize to promote collective action against saloons. Seventy women followed Lewis’s advice and began praying and singing in local saloons, trying to embarrass owners and customers. Other women in western New York and Ohio began using similar tactics, and this was soon dubbed the “women’s crusade” against liquor and saloons. In some cases the crusade worked; these successes encouraged women in various communities to engage in similar activities, and they were sometimes successful in closing places where alcoholic beverages were served. According to Diocletian Lewis, these tactics closed 17,000 saloons within six months in Ohio alone.