Sarah Ward hears the mistakes and misconceptions about the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union all the time.
People regularly get the name of the world-famous Evanston-based group wrong, saying “Women’s” instead of “Woman’s.” They assume the only issue it advocates is abstinence from alcohol. And, seeing as how Prohibition ended 71 years ago, a fair number of people are surprised it still exists at all.
One stereotype, she said, is true: most WCTU members are older women.
“I’m in my 60s,” said Ward, president of both the national and international bodies. “But I’m not one of those gray-haired old ladies. My hair’s still brown, and I’m not coloring it.”
She laughs lightly before adding: “See, good living pays off.”
And for the WCTU, good living still means largely one thing: No drinking.
Despite society’s increased acceptance of alcohol over the last 60 years, including at many of the churches the WCTU used to work with, the organization has held fast to its core belief. It still asks new members to sign the same abstinence pledge card that its legions did over a century ago.
“We believe in the message,” said Ward, who joined the WCTU when she was in 8th grade growing up in Knightsville, Ind., where she now lives. “So, we’re not going to change the message to be popular.”
But Ward conceded that the group’s aging membership signifies an ever-more daunting problem for the organization.
“In another 20 years–and I don’t mean just the WCTU, but other social service organizations–I wonder where we’re going to be in this country,” she said. “We’ve all had to rethink our positions, because we’ve come to a generation that just aren’t joiners.”
The 131-year-old organization was once the largest and most powerful women’s social, religious and political group in the country, once boasting more than 400,000 U.S. members.
The group helped pass the 18th Amendment to the Constitution banning the sale of alcohol in 1919 and the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote a year later. Today the WCTU has just 5,000 members nationwide and barely registers on the wider cultural landscape.
The numbers have continued to decline in recent years despite new programs designed to attract working women who may share the organization’s family-centered sentiments about alcohol, drugs and tobacco but don’t have as much time for the cause as the stay-at-home moms of decades past.
The problem is so bad that last year, when the only remaining local union in northern Illinois got its first new member in four years, “we were very excited,” said Virginia Beatty, past president of the Evanston-based Frances Willard Union, named after the WCTU’s most famous leader. “And she was under 50, which is getting pretty far down there for us,” said Beatty, 75, also the librarian at the Frances Willard House in Evanston, a National Historic Landmark.
The decline in numbers is not surprising, said John Zimmerman, a history professor at New York University and the author of “Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America’s Public Schools,” which dealt with the WCTU.
“Since the 1950s, I think they’ve been fighting against the tide” of acceptance of alcohol, he said.
The organization has been supporting an increasingly conservative list of issues that are in line with the evangelical Christian movement but several strides away from the organization’s history as a progressive group.
In its press releases, the WCTU still trumpets its early involvement not only in raising awareness of the dangers of alcohol, tobacco and drugs, but also in promoting suffrage for women, blacks and other disenfranchised groups, child labor laws, equal pay, unions’ rights and shelters for women and children.
“I think in their day, they were perceived as fairly liberal,” said Christine Woyshner, assistant professor of education at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Looking back, the race piece of their platform is huge. Speaking out about women of color was very progressive.”
But decades later, traditionally progressive issues are no longer on the agenda.
At the WCTU’s most recent national convention in August in Charleston, W.V., it passed six resolutions it asked its members to act on. One encouraged people to vote, and another set Sept. 9 as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Awareness Day.
But of the other four, one commended President Bush for his effort to stop the use of federal funds for stem-cell research–consistent with the organization’s opposition to abortion. The remaining three involved sexuality. One supported the Marriage Protection Act, another encouraged children to take part in the Day of Purity, and another commended students who opposed homosexuality.
“My strong guess is the women in this organization are going to vote for the president next week and not his challenger,” Zimmerman said.
The membership decline is having a direct impact on the finances of the national body, which has an endowment of roughly $1 million but has been hit by the struggling stock market, fewer bequests and declining membership.
“That is causing a major panic,” said Mary McWilliams, secretary of the Evanston union.
One result of the financial crunch is that the group has struggled in recent years to make repairs to its historic, four-building campus in downtown Evanston, listed last year as one of the state’s 10 most-endangered historic properties by the Illinois Landmarks Preservation Council.
For decades, the WCTU has fended off developers’ offers for parcels of the valuable land, which is all zoned for high-rises, but now it listens more closely.
Ward acknowledges the group has a long way to go to restore any of the luster of its youth–or even to sustain itself. But she says it’s out of the question that the WCTU’s greatest achievement will be duplicated.
“I’d like to think I’m a reasonable person,” she said. “The way we will have prohibition again is when each person makes the decision, not the government, and we’ll have self-imposed prohibition.”
