Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century

Judging by their public images they tended to be masculine in appearance and outlook. Some marched into saloons and emptied them. Others spoke for hours without respite in front of packed houses. Fletcher (Hardin-Simmons U.) finds the temperance movement to be far more complicated that the photos in high school textbooks would indicate, tracing the roots of the movement in power struggles about identity and authority as early as antebellum days. She traces the temperance counter-cultures that sprang up at the Civil War, the relationship between the Civil War and the war on alcohol, and the evolution of veracity and respectability (if not moral superiority) of the crusading woman. In a very interesting chapter she describes how power and cause danced around each other as leaders of disparate temperance movements began to form coalitions and develop a national organization that could contain them all along with their intentions. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)