Alliance between Prohibition and Woman's Rights?
The connections between the temperance and suffrage movements in the post-Civil War era have been frequently studied. Not so for the antebellum period. This document project focuses on two rival temperance conventions of 1853, the all-male World's Temperance Convention and Whole World's Temperance Convention organized in protest of the exclusion of women from the movement. Out of this rivalry grew a working alliance between woman's rights activists, who were often "Ultras" in the parlance of the day, and more conservative male advocates of the Maine Law. In addition to telling a previously overlooked episode in antebellum reform, the project also examines the variety of reformers active in the 1850s.
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