The Crusade Story: A Pageant

The Crusade Story: A Pageant

This pageant is an adaptation of the story of the Woman’s Crusade as described by Elizabeth Putnam Gordon in Women Torch-Bearers: The Story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1924), here dramatized by Mrs. W. P. Chase. The Woman’s Crusade was a series of nonviolent protests during the winter of 1873-1874, in which women gathered outside of saloons, prayed, sang, and asked saloonkeepers to pledge to stop selling liquor and find a new line of business. Following crusades in 900 different communities located in more than thirty-one states, women crusaders formed the WCTU. “The characters impersonated” in the pageant include Eliza Thompson, the leader of the Woman’s Crusade, Thompson’s husband and children, founding members of the WCTU, religious leaders, and men and women who attended Diocletian Lewis’s stirring speech in Hillsboro, Ohio, which launched the first crusade. Through The Crusade Story and similar materials, the WCTU used print and performance to craft their origin story, instruct later generations in the history of the temperance movement, and celebrate women’s moral influence, piety, and public activism.

Mrs. W. P. Chase

The Crusade Story: A Pageant (Evanston, Illinois: National W.C.T.U. Publishing House, n.d., ca. 1925).

National WCTU Publishing House

ca. 1925