ABSTRACT
In December 1873, Dio Lewis, a noted reformer and physician, gave a speech in Washington Courthouse, Ohio entitled “The Power of Woman’s Prayer in Grog Shops.” He urged women to take the initiative in the war against saloons by employing their moral authority and shutting down the establishments with their prayers. It was not a new speech-he had in fact been delivering it for some twenty years-but this time, the women in his audience took his message to heart and carried out his suggestions in their town with great success. By New Year’s, all the saloons in the town had closed, their owners’ consciences heavily burdened by the meek pleas of their female visitors. Rumsellers there reportedly trembled in fear “that unless they conformed to the wishes of these praying women, the avenging wrath of God would be thundered upon them.”2 This was an early episode in the great Woman’s Crusade, in which thousands of American women took to the streets on behalf of temperance and through which a new, revitalized period of activity against alcohol began in the United States.3 Dio Lewis’s movement spread quickly throughout Ohio and beyond in the winter and spring of 1874. By the end of January, over thirty towns in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee reported Crusades; by the end of February, one hundred and fifty communities in twelve more states joined the movement. 4
Historians have usually seen the Crusade as a feminine outpouring of frustration with men’s failure to dispose of the alcohol problem that ravaged many of the Crusaders’ own homes.5 While this explanation certainly
held true in many cases, it is also true that the image of the Crusader was as much a male construction as a female one and as important to men as to women. The Crusader image employed antebellum nostalgia to lend new vitality and definition to the postbellum temperance movement. As we have seen, the Civil War’s disruption of temperance produced significant ideological shifts, particularly with regard to its use of gender. The antebellum icon of the self-made man lost much of its power, as reformers re-imagined temperance as a political and cultural war. In the face of doubts about men’s political abilities and in the absence of any real political victories, the movement constructed the Crusader as a new icon to revitalize its base. The icon performed a few functions for the movement. It resurrected the movement’s antebellum heritage, which many feared was lost. It dramatically and spectacularly reaffirmed the rightness of the cause, thereby reinforcing male reformers’ political work. And it employed female publicity and women’s large presence in the movement in a context other than political feminism.
