Many temperance activists believed that wife-beating was a byproduct of drunkenness and historical evidence suggests they were not wrong.
Some feminists in the movement took the argument further by insisting that it was also a gendered problem, enacted on women by men. Women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Bloomer—who was most famous for creating the Bloomer costume—campaigned for the liberalization of divorce laws as the logical extension of the temperance movement and its equation of drink with domestic violence.
These antebellum feminists argued that changes to divorce practice were a moral necessity. They considered it a cruel perversion of marriage and motherhood to require a woman to remain married to a husband who was made “brutish” by alcohol.
By 1850, some states granted divorce on the grounds of cruelty, which was vaguely defined, but battered women were dependent on the mercy and judgment of individual judges.
Stanton, Anthony, and Bloomer sought legal changes that would allow women to divorce their husbands on the grounds of drunkenness as well. While these changes would not have directly addressed the issue of domestic violence, advocates hoped that they would expand women’s access to divorce and allow them to more easily call on state intervention in their marriages.
Most American women, however, were not supportive of the campaign to liberalize divorce laws.
The 250,000 women who belonged to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), one of the largest women’s reform organizations of the nineteenth century, remained focused on their goal to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol, assuming related social problems would disappear as a result.
Frustrated by a lack of support for their crusade to expand divorce laws, Stanton and Anthony both resigned from the New York State Temperance Society in 1853. Although they continued their campaign to change divorce laws, neither one ever joined another temperance society again.
While they did not endorse strategies such as liberalizing divorce and child custody laws for abused women, the women of the WCTU did seek to redefine the patriarchal family as one in which women held the power to reform abusive husbands.
These reformers believed that the home was a place where women held moral authority and could potentially (as the Puritans thought) shame their husbands into behaving themselves.
When Frances Willard, president of the WCTU from 1879 to 1898, died, both the WCTU’s influence and the focus on women’s issues in the fight for prohibition began to wane. This was partly due to Willard’s death and partly due to the rising popularity of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), which took up the campaign until the passage of prohibition.
Although the battered wife who populated the WCTU’s literature and rhetoric would not completely disappear from the campaign, she was no longer its central figure.
After the Constitutional amendment barring the production, transport, and sale of alcohol took effect in 1920, domestic violence almost completely disappeared from public consciousness.
As Elizabeth Pleck says, “There was virtually no public discussion of wife beating from the turn of the century until the mid-1970s.”