Tired of being second-class American citizens, women throughout the 19th and 20th centuries joined the fight to demand greater government involvement that would give women more rights. As the radical voice of Prohibition, Francis Willard advanced this fight by pushing women's issues into the political arena. Organizations like the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) were influential forces fighting to improve women's working conditions by letting America know that unfavorable working conditions were faced not only by men but by women as well. The battle for suffrage was long and arduous, but women never gave up because, as Susan B. Anthony said in 1906, "failure is impossible." As people and ideas poured into the United States, women formed interethnic and class organizations to advance their rights by fighting for Prohibition, labor reform, and suffrage that led to a more responsive and powerful government. Prohibition provided women with a means to support a more responsive government by expressing animosity toward their perceived inferiority and toward foreigners. The Woman's Crusades of 1873–1874, in which 100,000 women went to saloons demanding an end to the sale of alcohol, led to the formation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874 which campaigned for the abolition of legal alcohol consumption to protect women. and children of her abusive husband and father. After becoming president of the WCTU in 1879, Francis Willard moved the WCTU from a religious to a political perspective by redefining “alcoholism as a disease rather than a sin, and poverty as a cause rather than a result of drinking.” Globalization has influenced this view because most of the afflicted... middle of paper... began at the local level but through radicalism and the “winning plan” soon progressed to become a national phenomenon that led to the nineteenth amendment. By demanding greater rights and government involvement, women were ending the era in which they were considered second-class citizens. Works Cited James L. Roark et al., The American Promise, Value Edition, Volume II: From 1865: A History of the United States, (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009), 563, 628.Ibid. , 628.Ibid., 652-654.Ibid., 630.Ibid., 628.Ibid., 563, 628, 652.Ibid., 562-563.Ibid., 629.Ibid., 652.Ibid., 699 .Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among the Nations, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 66-70.Roark et al. , The American Promise, 652.Ibid., 654.Ibid., 653Ibid., 653-654.Ibid., 629Ibid., 629-630.Ibid., 678-679.Ibid., 701.Ibid.., 679.