Suffrage, Self-Determination, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Nebraska, 1879-1882

This essay explores the interplay between Nebraska suffrage and temperance rhetoric from 1879 to 1882. Nebraska activists used a wide range of arguments, including conventional gender ideas, to construct a conception of womanhood that was more radical than the late nineteenth-century convention. Through their woman suffrage periodical and local newspaper column, suffrage and temperance reformers centralized religion as the tactical framework through which they argued for self-determination.