Temperance

The temperance movement, which flourished from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, attempted to limit or eliminate alcohol consumption. Although both men and women drank alcoholic beverages, temperance reformers generally focused on male drinking because they considered intoxication harmful to dominant middle-class constructions of manhood. Drinking, they believed, profoundly threatened social order by preventing men from being responsible citizens and patriarchs.

Many Americans of the colonial and Revolutionary periods objected to excessive drinking on the grounds that it challenged two traits thought basic to manhood: moderation and moral autonomy. But a substantial social movement against alcohol began only during the 1810s and 1820s (particularly in industrializing New England), sparked by the development of a market economy, the increasing mechanization of production, the emergence of identifiable middle and working classes, and the development of a middle-class “cult of domesticity”and the “breadwinner” model of manhood. Such early organizations as the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance (1813) and the American Temperance Society (1826), led by elites and the middle class, advocated moderate alcohol use and were most concerned about public drinking among working-class men. They branded drinking men as unreliable workers and inadequate breadwinners who lacked in self-control and were liable to depend on charity in times of crisis. Middle-class reformers claimed that sobriety, self-control, and hard work— values they considered central to male responsibility and to their own social and economic status—would allow men to support their families and improve their station in life. Thus, they attributed such troubling social problems as poverty and labor unrest to working men's use of alcohol, rather than to inequities in the new industrial economy.

In the 1840s a new type of temperance society emerged, exemplified by the Washingtonians and the Sons of Temperance. Inspired by the impulse toward religious perfectionism emerging from the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, these new societies called for total abstention from alcoholic beverages. By describing immoral behavior as “enslavement to vice,” and therefore as a failure of the will, they emphasized moral purity and self-control as constitutive of manhood. While these societies, like their predecessors, understood masculinity in terms of hard work and breadwinning, they were also fraternal organizations that fostered strong homosocial bonds among their members and associated manliness with mutual support and social activism. Their initiation rituals, like those of other fraternal organizations, enacted a rebirth of the new member into a family of men, and they frequently represented their temperance work in martial terms, parading in uniform and describing themselves as armies of reform. In this way, they claimed that sobriety and participation in the reform of others (sometimes associated with female benevolence) were essentially masculine behaviors. Much less exclusive than older groups, they drew large working- and middle-class memberships and spread throughout the nation.

While antebellum temperance activity was usually intended to support the power and status of middle-class men, after the Civil War it became an important means for women to challenge male political and social dominance. Founded in 1874, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) quickly became the largest nondenominational women's organization of the nineteenth century. It soon expanded its purpose from battling the saloon to confronting other social problems, particularly women's lack of political and social rights. Advocates for women's rights often successfully used [Page 456]male drinking as an argument for decreasing male power. Two of the most important legal rights won by married women in the nineteenth century—the right to own property in their own name and the right to bring lawsuits on their own behalf—were won largely by evoking the image of the inebriate husband and his oppressed wife.

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