In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Temperance cause brought together two different streams of Protestantism--the conservative Evangelicals with their profoundly individualistic ethos and the reform-minded Social Gospellers. The former were preoccupied with personal, not societal, reformation. The latter, however, were committed to achieving God’s purpose by building the New Jerusalem and establishing God’s Kingdom on earth through collective political action and social reform.

According to Phillips (1996) prohibition offered the progressives of the Social Gospel an issue that clearly demanded government action which the profoundly individualistic Evangelicals would support. From moral reform social reform would surely flow, addressing in the process the wider social ills of society once the efficacy of government intervention was made manifest to the Social Gospellers’ more conservative cousins. “Temperance however was not the central issue in the political agenda of Social Christianity. It served more of a midwife function between the womb of the evangelical world of self-improvement and the world of society regeneration” (Phillips 1996:202).

Opposition to the Temperance movement came from many quarters, including the wealthy liquor interests--the distillers, brewers, and hotel-keepers, and often unfolded along class lines. Drunkenness as a social problem was often defined as one affecting the working classes; presumably inebriation in the upper echelons was less threatening to the social order.

Hardly an egalitarian organization, racial minorities were generally barred from membership in temperance societies as were women. In Ontario, societies were largely formed in the 1800s in reaction to the large influx of Irish immigrants with whom drunkenness and other undesirable social flaws were commonly associated by the province’s resident Protestants. In the early 1830s, Upper and Lower Canada even shared common ground on temperance but the congruence between Canada’s two solitudes was short-lived (Noel 1995).

Eventually women gained access to the societies and became a dominant force within the movement, co-opting the temperance frame to advance other social issues of concern to them. Lacking property and other legal rights, including the right to vote, women had little recourse to protect their economic or physical security, or that of their children, from what they saw as the effects of men’s drunkenness. Although the Women’s Christian Temperance Union began in Canada as an organization promoting abstinence, it soon began to connect the dots between drink and a menu of other social problems--poverty, family breakdown, and hardship for women and children. It also worked with women in prison, promoted women’s suffrage, and campaigned against smoking, narcotic use, and male infidelity. There were major differences in approach between the Canadian and American women’s temperance movements. Canadian women did not sing hymns outside drinking houses or break up taverns, Carrie Nation-style, with hatchets (Smart and Ogborne 1996). The Canadian WCTU organized along political lines, lobbied town councils and magistrates who had the power to issue licenses, and petitioned political leaders who set policy. The focus of the Canadian campaign was to reduce the number of taverns and eventually to bring in prohibition. The American Social Gospel, by contrast, never took on the issue of advancing women’s rights (Phillips 1996).

By the mid-1890s, the temperance campaign had enjoyed enormous success and a large part of Canada was legally dry. Prohibitionists then looked to Ottawa for national legislation. While the Conservatives resisted pressure from the prohibitionist lobby, the Liberals cultivated its support by promising a plebiscite. After Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier was elected with prohibitionist help, a national vote on prohibition was finally held in 1898 and won by a very narrow margin. Had women had the vote at the time, the results would certainly have been even more decisive. Nevertheless, Laurier, mindful that prohibition no longer had the support in Quebec that it once enjoyed or continued to have in the rest of Canada, was never a supporter of prohibition and was disinclined to act on so slight a margin, citing a low voter turn-out as his excuse (Alexander 1990).