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Feature Article on Carry Nation. Topic: WOMEN &
PEOPLE
Written by Jim Sayre in February,
1997
TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT HAD ROOTS IN SHELBY COUNTY, OHIO...Pg 2 |
| Carry Nation’s free-swinging assaults on
saloons came nearly 20 years after a widespread movement against liquor interests by
Victorian ladies using tactics akin to those of Ghandi and Martin Luther King in the next century:
nonviolence. In 1873, groups of church women in Ohio towns including Hillsboro, Washington
Court House, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland staged marches and prayers-in at local
drinking holes, establishing their tactic of embarrassing saloon keepers and their
patrons. "The ladies’ success was due in part to the deference most men still
showed ‘women of quality’ in the Victorian Era" (Ohio and Its People,
by Knepper). Such demonstrations caused a temporary suspension of liquor traffic, but
local laws against obstructing the streets soon curbed the ladies and the flurry of
anti-saloon activities subsided within a year. Nation’s later
"hatchetations" would become an embarrassment, not to saloon keepers who were
more often just plain angry, but to the "women of quality" who would sing hymns
and pray outside saloons, but abhor the unlady like violence that became Nation’s
trademark. Area towns were not exempt from the "grand crusade." Following a few
weeks of demonstrations in Shelby County, the Sidney Journal reported ..."The
saloons at Newport (maybe one once operated by Gloyd) have quit selling whisky by the
drink..." (SJ, Apr. 3, 1874).
Snow was falling on Piqua’s streets in late January 1874 as two hundred women,
after meeting at the First Presbyterian Church, marched on the city’s saloons reading
the word, singing, and entreating the owners to close their evil establishments (Women
and Temperance, Piqua, Ohio, by Oda). The bartender at the City Hotel confronted the
women by declaring "I must take a bath" and then began removing his
clothing. Buckets of cleaning water thrown in their direction were among the indignities
visited upon the crusaders.
The active street work of the women. Crusaders gradually
came to an end as fewer women were willing to brave the scorn of the saloonkeepers for
such inconclusive and often very temporary results...Many of the women turned to
the...local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union" organized in
mid-February, according to Oda. Piqua had supported three breweries and nineteen saloons
in 1870, but the saloons closed after Piqua’s prohibition ordinance went into effect
several years later (Oda; SJ, Apr. 3, 1874).
Temperance lectures at the Methodist Church in
February 1874 and organization of a "Woman’s Whisky War" soon after at the
Presbyterian Church marked the beginning of Sidney’s temperance movement. "The
ladies of Sidney are thoroughly organized, equipped, and disciplined, and have a large
squad of men in the rear to support them with their counsel, money, and even assistance if
necessary," the local paper reported (SJ, Feb. 13, 1874). "Mrs. Wykes was
elected President, Mrs. Thomas Stephenson, Vice President, and Miss Ella Rogers,
Secretary."
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