The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

Historical Analysis: WCTU (1899 – Travel Diary – Indiana) Victoria Krus 2015 In June of 1899, Martha McMillan traveled to Lyons, Indiana where she visited family. During her stay, she attended a WCTU meeting and gave a lengthy speech about the importance of good, moral mothers in the home. Several times throughout her journals, Martha references different social gatherings, meetings, elections, and conventions held by the WCTU. The organization seems to have played a large role in her life. With this in mind, more knowledge about the WCTU will provide insight into Martha’s beliefs and convictions. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, or the WCTU, was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in November 1874. Annie Wittenmyer became the first president of the organization and established 1,000 local groups as well as a journal titled Our Union . When Wittenmyer opposed adding suffrage and abstinence from alcohol to the groups’ platform in 1879, Frances Willard replaced her. Willard helped make the WCTU “one of the largest and most influential women’s groups of the 19 th century by expanding its platform to campaign for labor laws, prison reform and suffrage”(“Woman’s Christian Temperance Union”). After Willard’s death in 1898, the WCTU shifted their main focus to prohibition. The organization worked hard to make life better for the lower class (Gusfield 223). Joseph Gusfield writes in his article, which traces a 100-year history of the WCTU, that “the American temperance movement during the nineteenth century was a part of a general effort toward the improvement of the worth of the human being through improved mortality as well as economic conditions”(Gusfield 222-23). The WCTU worked to “secure penal reform, to shorten working hours and raise wages for workers, and to abolish child labor” (Gusfield 223). They also 162