It was and is still the largest mass movement of women to date... Willard, the second national president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, wrote later in her memoirs, that the crusade “was like the fires we used to kindle on the western prairies, a match and a wisp of grass were all that was needed, and behold the spectacle of a prairie on fire sweeping across the landscape, swift as a thousand untrained steeds and no more to be captured than a hurricane".