The Ontario Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) quickly evolved from an organization established to eradicate the consumption of alcohol to become concerned with broader social problems. Sharon Cook shows that the WCTU nurtured a distinct feminist culture that promoted the family, children, and an important public role for women.

Using an extensive array of primary sources, including local WCTU minute books and correspondence, Cook describes the origins, structures, strategies, and achievements of the Ontario WCTU in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She discusses the importance of its positions on such issues as Social Purity, women's franchise, the appropriate role of single women, working women's rights, the treatment of female offenders, and the effect of the WCTU's youth work.

Cook traces the empowerment of women in the WCTU to the union's evangelical roots, arguing that the views of the Ontario WCTU were grounded in a vision of society that based the development of a moral society on the family unit and its moral centre, the mother.