Lucas embodied the phase of women's temperance that saw the movement's power as being primarily in the home and in the superiority of women's moral virtues. In her fourth annual report she commented: ‘I believe (that) in the household, women have a greater power over men, than men have over women, in inducing abstinence from intoxicating drinks’. During the 1870s, she also made increasingly conservative assessments of the reality of the British position regarding social protest. British women would not, Lucas believed, emulate the American crusade marches. ‘It is hardly likely we can go through the streets and kneel at the doors of the gin palaces’, she reasoned, but temperance women in Britain could hold processions and assemblies. They could also lobby, and in 1879, she presented the first women's petition in favour of Sunday closing to the House of Commons.