Social Issues : WCTU Taps Sparse Assets to Fight Alcohol : Although membership is less than 40,000, the organization continues to spread its message of abstinence.

For the ladies in the two-story brick house on Chicago Avenue these are busy days, because convincing a nation to celebrate the holidays with milk punch and apricot delights instead of martinis and beer is no simple task.

But try they do, just as they have for 119 years. They have mailed out thousands of pamphlets with recipes for alcohol-free drinks, developed a new line of anti-alcohol posters and literature delivered to hundreds of schools, and carried their message about the evil of alcohol from town halls to talk shows in a dozen states.

Listeners often think they’re hearing a ghost.

“When I go on the radio, someone invariably calls in and says, ‘I thought you were dead,’ ” said Rachel Kelly, 70, national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, once the most influential women’s movement in the world. “And I tell them no, the WCTU is alive and well and accomplishing a great deal.”

Admittedly, though, it has not been an easy struggle. The WCTU’s membership, having peaked at 1.5 million on the giddy eve of Prohibition in 1920, has fallen to just under 40,000, including 5,000 honorary male members. (There are 500,000 more members in 53 other countries.)

The group’s financial resources have dwindled, and, perhaps most distressing, there are signs that people do not pay much attention to the WCTU any more in the national debates on alcohol, drugs, tobacco, abortion, school prayer and family values.

“It’s pretty clear we’re going to have to change or the WCTU will go down the tubes,” said Kelly, a retired Maine schoolteacher and administrator, whose husband, a retired pastor, now works as the printer at the organization’s national headquarters here. “We need a higher profile. We need to raise money. We need more members, younger members, so we can shed the image that we’re just a bunch of little old ladies who go to tea parties.”

Mention the WCTU to most Americans and the image that comes to mind is that of Carry Nation, the 6-foot, 175-pound Kansas terror who used to recite biblical passages as she demolished saloons with a hatchet. But Nation was an outcast in the temperance movement of the late 19th Century, and WCTU founder Frances Willard, whose statue stands today in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, advocated a less radical approach. Her hymn-singing followers prayed in the streets outside barrooms while others stationed themselves at saloon doors to write down the names of those who entered.

As often as not, the women were cursed and splattered with tobacco juice, but by those doors was born the nation’s first women’s liberation movement.

In addition to trying to free citizens from “the grip of drink,” the WCTU fought for women’s suffrage and equal pay for equal work for both sexes.

It founded the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Parent Teacher Assn., the Legal Aid Society for women and the poor, the nation’s first day care centers. It helped enact child labor laws and the mandatory teaching of health classes in school.

The heart of the women’s message--which today doesn’t sound any more radical than a Dan Quayle campaign speech--was that the family was the bedrock of society and influences that threatened it should be eliminated.

“I don’t know how much faith I have that we’ll ever see total abstinence,” said seamstress Jean Burgess, whose family tradition of teetotalism stretches back four generations. “But I heard that Evanston is promoting some alcohol-free gatherings during the holidays this year, and that’s encouraging. Maybe it’ll be like tobacco and people will stop drinking for health reasons.”

Since becoming national president five years ago, Kelly, who works full time and is paid $8,000 a year, has moved the WCTU more into the mainstream.

Outdated literature has been thrown away and texts rewritten. African Americans have gained positions of national leadership in the organization. The fight against alcohol has been widened to include drugs.

The Willard Memorial Museum, which attracts about a thousand visitors a year, has been given a facelift and a handful of scholars use the Frances Willard Memorial Library for research on the WCTU and alcoholism (though the library stopped buying books in the 1950s when the material available on alcoholism became too extensive). There’s been an upward blip of new members.

And what would Frances Willard (1839-1898) think if she knew how far her women’s liberation movement had gone?

“Oh, my, she wouldn’t approve of a lot of it,” said WCTU Treasurer Marilyn Staples. “She fought to get women’s skirts up off the floor. But she would have drawn the line at the miniskirt.”