What Is One Group That Was Targeted by the Women's Christian Temperance Union?

The answer

One group targeted by the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was immigrants — especially Catholic and Jewish immigrants arriving from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. The WCTU was largely composed of native-born, middle-class, Protestant women who linked alcohol to the saloon culture of these newer arrivals. Their anti-drink campaigns often carried a strong current of nativism — the belief that native-born (Protestant) Americans and their values were superior and under threat.

Saloons were social and political hubs for many immigrant communities, so a campaign against alcohol was also, in effect, a campaign against immigrant institutions. This is why the WCTU is remembered not only as a temperance organization but as one entangled with the nativist and Anglo-Protestant moral-reform movements of the late 19th century.

How the WCTU worked and grew

Founded in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, the WCTU became the largest women's organization of the 19th century. Under president Frances Willard, who led from 1879 until her death in 1898, it adopted a "Do Everything" strategy — expanding far beyond alcohol into a wide reform agenda: women's suffrage, labor protections, public health, prison reform, and education. The WCTU's official emblem was a white ribbon symbolizing purity.

While its rhetoric championed home protection and moral uplift, its targets in practice included the liquor industry and saloon-keepers, and — through association — the immigrant, Catholic, and working-class communities that sustained saloon culture.

The bigger picture: temperance and nativism

The temperance movement overlapped with broader anxieties about immigration and urban change. Reformers often framed drinking as a foreign vice corrupting an idealized Protestant America. This connection helps explain why Prohibition (the 18th Amendment, ratified 1919) drew support from both moral reformers and nativist groups.

The WCTU's most lasting achievements were real and significant: it helped secure mandatory temperance education in public schools, advanced the women's suffrage cause, and built organizing skills and political networks for a generation of women. But understanding its history honestly means recognizing that its campaigns frequently targeted immigrants and the working poor, not just the abstract evil of alcohol.

Why other answers may appear

Depending on how the question is framed, acceptable targeted groups also include saloon owners / the liquor industry and, more broadly, the working class. But the answer that best captures the WCTU's nativist dimension — and the one most study keys expect — is immigrants.