Calling All Women! Fighting the Booze and The Bullets

The Temperance movement in America needs to be considered well outside of the narrow remit of limiting alcohol consumption. It was a central component contributing to the emerging suffrage movement in the nineteenth century. The national movement for equal rights and the vote for women was against absolute power in the forms of patriarchy, church administrations and slavery. Although there was considerable suffrage activity across the country, egalitarianism proved irrelevant to many Americans in the post-Reconstruction period of adjustment and reunification. There were many injured and maimed soldiers struggling to adjust to their former lives. Women who had taken on more responsibilities for earning during the war, returned to the domestic sphere. But the veteran soldiers sought solace and escape away from home, preferring the male companionship of the drinking saloons. Women were determined to alter men’s behaviour and protect themselves from the frequency and severity of domestic violence and abuse. Additionally women had no financial rights to protect them and  there was the issue of limited control of household expenditure, particularly if it was squandered on alcohol. In 1876 Frances Willard, a former teacher and leader new to the temperance cause, saw the potential of linking this ‘feminism of fear’[1] to the evolving suffrage movement. 

Rather than just seeing the vote as a way to achieve prohibition, she broadened the appeal by promoting a gendered, moral transformation of politics. With her “Home Protection” speech in October 1876 Willard said that political activism, particularly voting, would help produce personal protection by winning temperance legislation. Her ideology chimed with those women whose main goal was physical security for themselves. By combining temperance and suffrage issues in this way, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) founded in 1874 became the most powerful women’s organisation in the late nineteenth century. The WCTU is also considered instrumental in preparing way for the later 18^th Amendment in 1919 which prohibited 

the sale of alcohol nationwide.

The close links between the suffrage campaign and temperance were explored in the none too serious Western “The Hallelujah Trail” in 1965, based on a novel by Bill Gulick[2]. Critically it was dismissed as an "absurdly inflated, prolonged, uninventive comedy western with poor narrative grip; all dressed up and nowhere to go".

Finally, emulating the concepts from the recent lecture on ' The Great Gatsby' which concentrated on locating the fiction within the real events of the historical period, this illustration advertises a Temperance event in New York at the time when the novel  'Ragged Dick' was published. 

The Steinway Hall went on to have an illustrious history as part of the New York cultural scene. See here for more details.

Partners in Winning the War

American Women and the Second World War

In the decades before World War Two, women’s role was largely seen as that of wife and mother, attending to the narrow demands of the domestic sphere. Following the Pearl Harbour attack, America was fully committed to the war effort and that meant the utilisation of female labour in all aspects of the war industries. 

They took office and clerical jobs in the armed forces in order to free men to fight. They also drove trucks, repaired airplanes, worked as laboratory technicians, rigged parachutes, served as radio operators, analysed photographs, flew military aircraft across the country, test-flew newly repaired planes, and even trained anti-aircraft artillery gunners by acting as flying targets.

At the beginning, there was an urgent need to recruit women for these jobs. A creative approach was taken to make contact. As so many were based at home with their domestic responsibilities, the radio was used to recruit women into the services.

Women heard radio appeals that offered the following logical reasoning: “If you can run a vacuum cleaner, you can run a machine in a factory.” Bibliography Suzanne, M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of  Liberal Feminism in the United States 1820 -1920 Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1996 http://www.truewestmagazine.com/writing-at-the-bend-of-the-river/ https://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/wctu.html http://www.steinwayhall.com/about-us/steinway-history http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?awh:84:./temp/~ammem_D2Q2:: http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/at-a-glance/women-in-ww2.pdf https://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/partners/1.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Radio

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[1] Suzanne, M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States 1820 -1920 Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1996

[2] http://www.truewestmagazine.com/writing-at-the-bend-of-the-river/