Woman's Christian Temperance Union (Chattanooga, Tenn.)
Dates
- Existence: 1882 - circa 1980
Biography
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of Chattanooga was founded in 1882 in Chattanooga, Tennessee by a group of women originally composed of Caroline B. Chapman, Louise M. Bush, Sarah E. Shaffer, Sophia J. Stanton, and Eliza J. Jenkins. The organization was a chapter of the national WCTU, a woman-led temperance organization that was one of the largest and most influential women’s organizations of the 19th century, with chapters across the country. The WCTU was originally founded in 1874 in response to the “Woman’s Crusade,” a series of anti-saloon demonstrations across Ohio and upstate New York.
The national WCTU was headquartered in Evanston, Illinois, and despite local chapters growing in number throughout the country, in the early 1880s, only a small number of chapters existed in the South. Between 1881 and 1883, the WCTU’s second president, Frances Willard, undertook three speaking tours through the South with the dual goal of recruiting Southern members and fostering reconciliation between a northern-based organization and the Southern temperance movement. In May 1881, Willard stopped briefly on her tour to give a speech in Chattanooga before visiting Nashville and Memphis. As a result of Willard’s tour though Tennessee, thirty-nine new unions formed across the state, including the chapter in Chattanooga. While the WCTU was primarily focused on prohibition reforms and temperance education, during Frances Willard’s presidency, the organization dramatically expanded its platform to include other social and political issues such as women’s suffrage and labor and prison reform.
In Chattanooga, the local chapter of the WCTU was likewise interested in addressing social reform issues beyond temperance. Soon after its founding in 1882, the WCTU of Chattanooga established a “working girls home” to provide low-cost room and board to the city’s self-supporting, single women in a supervised, Christian environment. The Working Girls Home, first opened in 1887, operated at several locations in Chattanooga over the years, occupying the building at 615 Lindsay Street for nearly fifty years from 1928-1976.
Officially incorporated as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Working Girls Home in 1889, the chapter later simplified its name to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Chattanooga. In 1901, the Working Girls Home changed its name to the Frances Willard Home in honor of the national organization’s former president. The Chattanooga chapter changed its name again in 1959 to the Frances Willard Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. While some members of the WCTU in Chattanooga continued to participate in the state-wide organization into the 1980s, operation of the Frances Willard Home ceased in 1976.
The WCTU of Chattanooga donated the Frances Willard Home’s building at 615 Lindsay Street to the Central Church of Christ. The building sat unused for three years, and was purchased in 1979 by a local investment group. The former boarding home was converted into commercial office space, reopening as the Frances Willard Building in 1980.