The Women's Moderation Union, headed by M. Louise Gross, helped the Women's Christian Temperance Union's insistence that it spoke for American women. When she heard the WCTU president make that assertion before the United States Congress in an effort to enhance its power and influence, Gross decided that those women who sought the repeal of prohibition needed a vehicle through which their voice of opposition could be heard.
Although the libertarian orientation of the Women's Moderation Union did not resonate well with some women, Gross' organization was successful in mobilizing and giving visibility to many women who opposed the national prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
Famous quotes containing the words women, moderation and/or union:
“Woman ... cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
—Barry Goldwater (b. 1909)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)