Women were a major part of several reform movements of the 1800s and early 1900s. These reform movements sought to promote basic changes in American society, including the abolition of slavery, education reform, prison reform, women's rights, and temperance (opposition to alcohol). A National Temperance Circular (ca. 1850) outlined the problems of drunkenness:
"...Our country is now harboring a fatal enemy; cherishing a plague of dreadful malignity; submitting to a tax which brings no increase to our treasury, while it perpetuates poverty, misery and crime. To prove this, let us state a few facts which may be relied on. Whatever may be said in favor of the temperate use of ardent spirits, (if that indefinite line could ever be drawn,) facts will show incontestibly, that the excessive use of them is the severest scourge with which our nation is visited: and you know that all drunkenness commences in the moderate use of them. Ardent spirit destroys health: ardent spirit creates idleness: ardent spirit ruins character: ardent spirit makes paupers: ardent spirit makes criminals: ardent spirit brutalizes men: ardent spirit destroys domestic happiness: ardent spirit ensures premature death: ardent spirit makes three-fourths of the business and expense of our criminal courts, jails and alms-houses: ardent spirit throws an immense tax on a christian community to support vice: ardent spirit unfits thousands and tens of thousands for the duties of this life and exposes them to the lawful retribution of the next...."