Why the W.C.T.U. Seeks the Ballot.
[Suffrage]. Willard, Mary H. Handbill: Why the W.C.T.U. Seeks the Ballot. [N.P. but likely Chicago]: [Women’s Christian Temperance Union], [ca. 1880].
Handbill; 6-5/8” x 9-5/16”; double-columns printed on off-white stock; folded once; corners a bit used. Generally very good in a custom-made cloth case.
The writer describes how temperance forces had brought before the legislature the 1878-79 petition for Home Protection, which would allow women to vote on liquor questions. The legislature voted it down “at two consecutive sessions.” Temperance supporters had to find another route; they would look to towns and municipalities to enact a Home Protection ordinance. Women would be allowed to vote on this one narrow issue. Willard details how the women tramped “house to house and street to street for signatures”; how meeting places were set up in every precinct where “timid women might rally, and from which they might go to the polls in company”; how those too young to vote tended children of women who could; how carriages were arranged for the elderly and infirm. In other words, classic campaign procedures were wheeled into action. (NAW notes that the “campaign became a model for WCTU action in other states.”) Even so, the temperance measure failed. As the author declares, the experience showed the women that to gain their objectives they had to be able to vote on the candidates as well as the issue. Women must have “the full ballot.” Frances Willard, the W.C.T.U.’s far-seeing President, had pushed the Union to see that it had to support suffrage if it wished to defeat the liquor interests. In Two Paths To Women’s Equality, Janet Giele records how politically effective the temperance forces became through such campaigns as documented by this handbill. In 1883 the annual convention adopted “a resolution favoring equal and unlimited suffrage for women...From that point forward the WCTU was the most effective grass-roots organization to promote the woman’s ballot.” A noteworthy piece of ephemera on how and why the WCTU became key to the winning of the vote for women.
Two Paths To Women’s Equality, by Giele.
NAW III, pp. 615-617.
(#4964)
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