"A star that gathers lustre from the gloom of night": wives, marriage, and gender in early-nineteenth-century American temperance reform.
This article argues that wives occupied a more central place than mothers in the early nineteenth-century American temperance movement, and that temperance literature portrayed them in two ways. First, temperance writers depicted the drunkard's wife as a pitiable example of the dire effects of male drinking on women and families. Second, they cast wives as potent moral influences on their husbands, capable of preventing the sober from faltering and reclaiming the drunkard. These portrayals coexisted with overtly misogynist views of women within the temperance movement that accused women of making men drunkards through perverted influence and blamed drunkard's wives for their own predicament. The temperance movement's depiction of wives' gender both reflected and contributed to the large ambivalence toward women in American society.
Martin
Scott C
SC
Associate professor of history and American culture studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
D000428:Alcohol Drinking; D005260:Female; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008393:Marriage / Q000266:history*; D012946:Social Welfare / Q000266:history*; D018454:Spouses / Q000266:history*; D013695:Temperance / Q000266:history*; D014481:United States