The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.)

By Sala Thanassi

“Frances Harper Women’s Christian Temperance Union, ca. 1893”

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, is a religious social reform organization still in operation today that is dedicated to abstinence from drugs and alcohol. In the lives of Frances Harper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the
WCTU paradoxically served as both a platform for their work and a hindrance to their goals.
Across overlapping generations, each of these women encountered both support and opposition to their causes—with the latter response more likely for actions relating to racial justice, such as Harper’s anti-segregation efforts and Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching campaign. Despite their ambivalence, these women’s experiences with the WCTU highlight some of the missions that were most significant to them as well.

At the end of the Reconstruction era, contemporary scholar Parker explains, the WCTU’s […]commitment to the expansion of federal power[…]explains its value to black women like Harper, who joined the WCTU because she agreed with its strategy of calling upon the federal government to help solve the country’s social and moral problems, especially through constitutional amendments for woman suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol. (145)

As noted, much of Harper’s activism included demands that the federal government intervene in social issues. She seemed to take this approach because state governments, particularly those in the South, exercised absolute power over Black folks majorly through lynch law. For this reason, Wells-Barnett worked heavily with state governments, most prominently by attempting to vote Black men into office in the midwest, while Harper targeted the federal government. In addition to the WTCU’s support of the expansion of federal power, Harper “recognized its large membership base as a potentially powerful site for interracial cooperation,” which was a major focus of her activist work in the 1880s, and agreed with the WCTU’s “focus on Christian reform and the protection of children” (145). “Harper’s experiences within the WCTU,” Parker asserts, “reveal the strengths and limitations of this crucial women’s organization, her own political priorities and strategies, and the fraught nature of black/white alliances in the 1880s and 1890s” (146). Harper’s work during the 1880s “highlights the lost possibilities” of interracial cooperation as Jim Crow laws increased in the 1890s (146). To this end, post-Civil War, Parker explains, “Harper committed herself to collaborating with white women for women’s rights because she perceived that women’s collective protest would gain more attention from the white politicians who ran the federal government than would black women’s separate activism” (147).

While fighting for women’s suffrage, Harper also supported temperance, linking the two causes together. Parker writes that “she optimistically believed that women would vote for prohibition legislation in order to stop the destruction of their homes and families through men’s
drinking.” (150). As discussed in Section Three: Literary Works, Harper linked temperance and suffrage in both of her short stories, Minnie’s Sacrifice and “Sowing and Reaping.” This stance, along with her “antialcohol poems of the 1850s” Parker asserts, “prepared her to sympathize with the goals of the WCTU” (152).

Harper began working with the WCTU in Philadelphia in the late 1870s, and in 1883, she “was appointed the national superintendent for ‘Work Among the Colored People of the North’” (153). In 1888, Harper wrote an article titled “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Colored Woman,” that was published in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review. In the article, she designated alcohol an enemy “to all races” which must be defeated through the vote (Parker 152). Harper argued that “the two races were on more equal footing [than during abolition] since they were fighting to solve a problem that equally affected black and white families” (152). Many Black women activists saw a chance for further interracial cooperation based on their ability to unite with white women in support of temperance, while others did not support the WCTU due to their blatant ignorance of many racial justice issues. Frances Willard, with whom Wells-Barnett had conflict, about which she writes in “The Red Record,” supported Harper’s appointment “to reassure members who might be uncomfortable with an interracial WCTU” (153). In her first annual report as the national superintendent, Harper prioritized duty “over rights[…]because duty included work for those more disadvantaged than they. Rights, in contrast, could lead to narrow and selfish work for personal gains at the expense of black women and men” (154). In her fifth address, she suggested many of the white members of the WCTU still ignored the fight against racism, particularly as it affected Black women in the North and Midwest. Parker explains, Harper suggested that it was easier for them to call for reforms or assistance for Southern blacks, the majority of whom were former slaves and who were literally farther away than the generally more educated, middle-class, and urban northern black WCTU members they had to interact with. The very proximity of Northern black women made white women uncomfortable, Harper charged, because they could not romanticize them as helpless but disembodied others. (156)

Over the next five years, Harper’s distrust in the WCTU grew. While the WCTU supported a bill which would provide millions of dollars to white and Black schools in the South, Harper grew concerned during debates about the bill, which exposed some members of the WCTU’s unwillingness to support equal education. She was filled with brief hope when another Black woman named Sarah Jane Woodson Early was appointed the national superintendent “among colored people in the South” (157). In the South, many Black women had created separate WCTUs or separated from white branches of the WCTU to avoid racist treatment and control of the organizations. When Harper joined the WCTU, she was the only Black woman on the Executive Committee or Board of Superintendents; within a few years, she had fought until two Black women were on both the Committee and Board.

In 1890, however, she was demoted from national superintendent as a result of backlash from a number of the WCTU’s white members, including Frances Willard who refused to focus on racism in the South among WCTU members. This rift eventually led to her 1896 decision to join the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs as a better venue for the kind of work she wanted to accomplish (MD State Archive, par. 14).

While Mary Church Terrell was a prominent advocate for women’s suffrage and social justice, she did not support the temperance movement, which naturally put her at odds with the WCTU. In her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, she wrote, “I could not help feeling that the W.C.T.U. was, as an organization, doing much to promote race and color prejudice, and it seemed to me that it was taking a very narrow and superficial view of a complex problem” (Terrell). She also expressed frustration with the fact that many white suffragists (some of whom belonged to the WCTU) refused to address either racial issues or the racism in their own organization. Unlike Harper, Terrell also believed that the organization’s focus on prohibition sidelined the more pressing matters of poverty, inequality, and discrimination. Some of her critical speeches and articles can be accessed through the Mary Church Terrell Papers at the Library of Congress.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett joined the WCTU in the 1890s, in the interest of forming alliances with white women’s organizations. Like Harper, she recognized that the WCTU had funds and membership that could support her anti-lynching activism. Her hopes were not realized, however, and she was not a member for long; like Terrell, she quickly grew frustrated with their overbearing focus on temperance and prohibition, and their neglect of the anti-lynching cause. In her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, she wrote convincingly, “I could not forget that while these same women were reluctant to help me in my fight against lynching, they had been very active in demanding the suppression of the liquor traffic” (Wells). Wells-Barnett eventually left the organization to continue her advocacy through different avenues. The records of Wells-Barnett’s and Harper’s involvement in the WCTU are preserved in the organization’s historical records, many of which can be located in archives and special collections at universities and libraries. You can also continue exploring Harper’s and Wells-Barnett’s advocacy for Black women during their time in the WCTU through the Frances Willard House Museum’s multidimensional digital project, beginning with their interactive timeline.