After successfully agitating for the vote for women from the 1890s onwards, Protestant women's organisations in Australia educated women at a grass-roots level on effective ways of applying political pressure on a wide range of topics and social concerns. Positioning their organisations as non party-political and separate from more overtly feminist groups, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the Mothers' Union, all transnational as well as national organisations, attracted women who were keen to work for change- seeking to 'save' the individual as well as the greater society. WCTU campaigns around the regulation of alcohol and opium exposed stories of addiction and associated poverty and misery within families. Long before breathalysers, they publicised the dangers of 'driving under the influence' and engaged with the thorny problem of how to test the level of alcohol in a driver's blood and were often at the forefront of disseminating such scientific temperance information in Australia. Using networks of women, the three organisations sought to agitate on a wide range of issues related to girls and women, connecting with public anxieties on the 'the servant problem', 'the girl problem', 'the sex problem', the 'cocktail menace' and on the particular vulnerabilities of girls and young women alone in the city; exploited in the workforce and living in circumstances that rendered them socially and sexually vulnerable. By the 1920s and 1930s these women's groups considered new possibilities of the modern era, noting with anxiety the easier access to divorce and birth control in the Soviet Union and the growing influence of both Communism and 'Hitlerism' in galvanising young people. This book explores the colourful debates and anxieties that were prevalent in the period of the 1890s to the 1930s and the responses of these key women's organisations whose leadership and campaigns acknowledged that-outside of parliament and party politics-women's connection to political matters could be both innovative and socially influential.
