Woman's work in America

by Unknown

There are two indirect results of this organized work among women, concerning which I wish to speak.

First. It is a strong nationalizing influence. Its method and spirit differ very little, whether you study them on the border of Puget Sound or the Gulf of Mexico. In San Francisco and Baltimore white ribbon women speak the same vernacular, tell of their gospel meetings and petitions, discuss the Union Signal editorials, and wonder “what will be the action of our next annual convention.”

Almost all other groups of women workers that dot the continent are circumscribed by denominational lines, and act largely under the advice of ecclesiastical leaders. The W. C. T. U. feels no such limitation. North and South are strictly separate in the women’s missionary work of the churches, but Mississippi and Maine, Texas and Oregon, Massachusetts and Georgia, sit side by side around the yearly camp-fires of the W. C. T. U. The Southern women have learned to love us of the North, and our hearts are true to them; while to us all who fight in peaceful ranks unbroken, “For God and Home and Native Land,” the Nation is a sacred name.

Second. Our W. C. T. U. is a school, not founded in that thought or for that purpose, but sure to fit us for the sacred duties of patriots in the realm that lies just beyond the horizon of the coming century.

Here we try our wings that yonder our flight may be strong and steady. Here we prove our capacity for great deeds; there we shall perform them. Here we make our experience and pass our novitiate that yonder we may calmly take our places and prove to the world that what is needed most was “two heads in counsel” as well as “two beside the hearth.” When that day comes the nation shall no longer miss, as now, the influence of half its wisdom more than half its purity, and nearly all its gentleness, in courts of justice and halls of legislation. Then shall one code of morals—and that the highest—govern both men and women; then shall the Sabbath be respected, the rights of the poor be recognized, the liquor traffic banished, and the home protected from all its foes.

Born of such a visitation of God’s spirit as the world has not known since tongues of fire sat upon the wondering group at Pentecost, cradled in a faith high as the hope of a saint, and deep as the depths of a drunkard’s despair, and baptized in the beauty of holiness, the Crusade determined the ultimate goal of its teachable child, the W. C. T. U., which has one steadfast aim, and that none other than the regnancy of Christ, not in form but in fact; not in substance but in essence; not ecclesiastically, but truly in the hearts of men. To this end its methods are varied, changing, manifold; but its unwavering faith these words express: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”

The Woman’s National Christian Temperance Union has a publishing house in Chicago that in 1889 sent out 130,000,000 pages of temperance literature; employs 146 men and women, mostly women; pays a dividend of seven per cent. on money invested; is the proprietor of its own presses and of its machinery, including an electrotyping department. It publishes the Union Signal, organ of the World’s and National W. C. T. U., with a weekly circulation of 85,000 copies; also four other papers for the young people, children, and Germans; and has connected with it a large job office for general printing. The directors of this great establishment are all women, and the editors women. No one can hold stock except a white ribbon woman that is a member of the W. C. T. U. This enterprise constantly enlarges because it has a sure foundation in the ten thousand local unions of the W. C. T. U.

The National W. C. T. U. has also founded a woman’s temperance hospital in Chicago, conducted throughout by women, its object being to prove experimentally that alcoholics have no necessary place in medicine.

A woman’s temperance temple, to cost over a million of dollars, was projected by Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, president of the W. C. T. U., of Chicago, and is now in course of erection. While the national society is in no wise responsible for this movement, it has done much to help it forward, and hopes in the course of time to have headquarters here for its publishing department, etc., a large hall for public meetings, a kindergarten, restaurant, and all the paraphernalia of a great temperance headquarters. Besides this it expects to realize from the rentals, as the building is located in the heart of the city, a large annual endowment for its various lines of work.

A Woman’s Lecture Bureau has been established in Chicago, which is constantly sending out speakers to all parts of the United States and Canada. These speakers may be men or women, but the management is in the hands of white ribboners.