The Maritime Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1875-1895 : labouring for a temperate society

Abstract

Throughout the late-nineteenth century, the Maritime Woman's Christian Temperance Union stood at the forefront of the region's temperance activity aided by their innovative programs and effective political lobbying and educational methods. Their reform work with its social purity emphasis represented an expanded temperance ideology, which pushed their social mandate beyond the boundaries set by earlier temperance organizations. Together their contemporary methods and ideas enabled them to influence the middle-class and gender ideals of the period.

Working as a regional force, the Maritime WCTU was successful especially in the work of children's character formation programs. They were able to gain the support and assistance of the state and religious authoritative bodies, the government and the church, to implement compulsory scientific temperance teaching in the public schools and gospel temperance teaching in many of the evangelical Sunday schools. Their juvenile work, with its contemporary pedagogical techniques and broad temperance message, extended the teaching of temperate life choices to Maritime children through leisure-time activities. The popular Maritime mothers' meetings, with its strong eugenics' emphasis, worked to equip mothers' with proper knowledge and skills to help them build temperate families. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, it became apparent that their individual reform programs were part of a larger nationalistic social vision, the establishment of a temperate Canada. The Maritime WCTU fought for woman's suffrage in the anticipation that it would allow them to further advance and expand their reform work.