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For blacks, widely assumed to be guilty of a range of promiscuities,

temperance was an issue that undermined such stereotypes.

For black women reformers, their membership in such organizations as the WCETU,

for example, was called the Women Something Temperance.

And it was all the clubs.

It was important for another reason.

Their public association with elite white women reformers served to affirm their own true womanhood.

It was no coincidence that at the time of the night's meeting and the WCETU organization,

Shelby County's Attorney General made a rare if backhanded declaration of moral equivalency between black and white women.

The precise context of the statement is unclear.

But according to an article that Eida wrote in a response,

the Attorney General had proclaimed that black women were no longer the harlots they had been in the past,

they could be as decent or disgraceful as white women.

Welles, though not appreciative of the positive sentiment,

wrote a malcorrective that was published in the white-owned Memphis Cimitar, a Republican paper,

as well as the New York Freeman.

Black women, she said, were not consoled by the knowledge that aristocratic circles furnished parallel examples of immorality.

The most disheartening aspect of race relations was the wholesale,

contentious defamation of black women, and the refusal to believe there are among us mothers, wives, and maidens

who have attained a true noble and refining womanhood.

Eida added that she only wanted them to be given equal credit for their virtues.

...