Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century / Edition 1

by Holly Berkley Fletcher

Overview

During the nineteenth century, the American temperance movement underwent a visible, gendered shift in its leadership as it evolved from a male-led movement to one dominated by the women. However, this transition of leadership masked the complexity and diversity of the temperance movement. Through an examination of the two icons of the movement — the self-made man and the crusading woman — Fletcher demonstrates the evolving meaning and context of temperance and gender. Temperance becomes a story of how the debate on racial and gender equality became submerged in service to a corporate, political enterprise and how men’s and women’s identities and functions were reconfigured in relationship to each other and within this shifting political and cultural landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415963121
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/27/2007
Series:	Studies in American Popular History and Culture
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: Self-Made Men: Temperance, Identity, and Authority in Antebellum America

Chapter Two: Temperance Counter-Cultures and the Coming of the Civil War

Chapter Three: "Let Patriots Join Hands:" The Civil War and the War on Alcohol

Chapter Four: Crusading Women: The Creation of a New Temperance Icon

Chapter Five: A "Knitting Together of Hearts:" The Crusader, the WCTU, and the Building of a Temperance Coalition

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Drawing on her 2004 dissertation, Holly Berkley Fletcher has written a provocative, well-researched, and mostly persuasive first book. It is based on many manuscript and prited sources, including innumerable periodicals and an enormous body of secondary literature. ... Like any good book about temperance, Fletcher's is more than that. Surveying almost a century from the American Temperance Society to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Fletcher focuses on two gendered icons, the self-made man and the crusading woman. ... " — CHOICE February 2009 Vol. 46 (D. M. Fahey, Miami University)

"Recommended." - D.M. Fahey, Choice

From the Publisher