The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

attempted to create legislation that would protect working girls being exploited by men (Gusfield 223). The Knights of Labor came alongside the WCTU to support the temperance movement after the WCTU gave their support to the labor movement (Gusfield 224). Gusfield notes that all of these efforts in moral reform are hard to separate from Christianity: “Prison reform, for example, was stressed as a way to rehabilitate character, to convert men to Christianity, and to prevent the suffering of prisoners” (Gusfield 224). Willard encouraged women to use their homemaking skills and their position in the home to make social change. She helped create a campaign of “social housekeeping” which “invoked traditional feminine values of domesticity and yet could be used to justify women’s public involvement in any number of social issues: alcohol temperance, domestic violence, labor justice, and women’s suffrage”(Beard 55). In 1882, they started the Kitchen Gardens Department to train girls “in the arts of cooking and household management” in hopes that young women could receive jobs as housemaids and avoid city life (Gusfield 224). Programs like the Kitchen Gardens Department made the movement seem more “home-like” by using the domestic strengths of the women involved (Beard 55). Deanna Beard argues in her article that the success of the WCTU is because of how “its leadership effectively articulated the need for female public activism, as unusual as the measure seemed, as a reasonable response to the extraordinary dangers of alcohol intemperace”(Beard 53). The WCTU called on women who had a “duty to protect the family” and who were already using “emotional persuasion” to civilize men (53). Martha McMillan believed these arguments and expounded upon these principles in the speech she gave at an Indiana WCTU meeting in July of 1899. She begins by encouraging the group by explaining to them that a small group with a clear focus can do more than a large group 163