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Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 07:52:08 -0700
From: Phil VanderMeer <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-Net Gilded Age and Progressive Era List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: book review: Blair on Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (September, 1999)

Carol Mattingly. _Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century
Temperance Rhetoric_. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1998. xv, 213 pp. Notes,
bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8093-2209-9.

Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Karen J. Blair <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, Central Washington University,
Ellensburg, Washington

Tactics for Temperance

Carol Mattingly, a professor of English at Louisiana State
University, has dissected aspects of the nineteenth century
American women's temperance movement that have not previously
been examined by temperance historians and biographers Mary
Earhart, Ruth Bordin, Jack Blocker, Barbara Epstein, Ian Tyrell
and Janet Giele.  Building on the foundation of their
scholarship, she has explored the rhetoric that activist women
employed in their advocacy of temperance in speeches and novels,
particularly in the middle years of the nineteenth century.  She
convincingly persuades the reader, via analysis of generous
quotations from Women's Christian Temperance Union records, city
newspaper accounts of temperance rallies and conventions, and
popular fiction by women authors, that alcohol abuse politicized
women to address the inequities they faced.  They did so in a
non-threatening, "lady-like" manner, aruguing they had a duty to
expose the vicitimization of women and children.  To do so, they
consciously kept a distance from women's rights radicals, and
instead launched an "ethical appeal." (p. 5)

Yet to dismiss temperance literature as conservative, as
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony did in their history
of women's suffrage, is to underestimate women's willingness to
bare such critical matters as physical abuse, infidelity of
husbands, women's lack of control over their own bodies, and
women's economic, legal and social dependency on men, according
to the author.  In fact, Mattingly argues that they were savvy
and successful reformers because their arguments "exhibit an
exceptional understanding of language use within the cultural
contextof their time." (p. 1).

Following a summary of mid-nineteenth century temperance
activism by women, the author studies three aspects of reform
rhetoric.  Part one examines speeches delivered by women that
antedate the formation of the large and powerful WCTU.
Rejecting the Stanton/Anthony dismissal of temperance advocates
as progressive activists, she enumerates the individuals, among
them Amelia Bloomer, Antoinette Brown and Clarina Howard
NIchols, who were plainly comfortable in both camps, at ease
discussing dress reform, divorce, property rights and suffrage
along with temperance.

Professor Mattingly next rejects our assumptions that 1870s
reformers unfailingly portrayed women as mere victims of men's

alcohol abuse.  She documents references to women's courage,
intelligence, and accomplishments and portrayals of temperance
advocates as role models and heroines.  She then focuses on the
language, rhythm and alliteration of language that activists
applied to "patriotic themes" of God, home and native land.
These were celebrated in speeches that lauded the mid-western
Women's Crusaders and women who provided aid to the Civil War.
Abundant scriptural references appealed to audiences who were
knowledgeable in Bible studies.  WCTU President Frances Willard
frequently interpreted the Bible to persuade her listeners that
"Woman is becoming what God meant her to be."  (p. 53)

The author also identifies techniques of public presentation
taught by Willard's WCTU to temperance speakers.  The proper
demeanor for delivering speeches was to present "a moral and
feminine character" (p. 65) in dress and appearance.  Rather
than diverting and angering an audience with masculine speech or
"tight" pants and short skirts of the Bloomer costume,
presenters were urged to act womanly for public approval.

Part two of this monograph deals with rhetoric in two specific
arenas of controversy.  One chapter explores an 1890s debate
over racial issues between WCTU leader Frances Willard and
African American activist Ida B.  Wells.  In 1894, while she
toured England, Wells attacked the American WCTU for the
organizaiton's complicity in lynching.  Willard defended her
organization, insisting it did not condone the practice.  She
portrayed northern and western chapters of her organization as
having integrated membership and she reported on separate but
strong black chapters throughout the American south.  Mattingly
documents their exchange and relays the contributions of other
key players, such as Frances E. W.  Harper, the WCTU national
Superintendent of Work Among Colored People, who distanced
herself from the WCTU in 1890, and Lucy Thurman of Wisconsin,
who reinstated the post in 1893 with Mary Murray Washington of
Alabama and Frances Joseph of Louisiana.  Finally, Mattingly
evalutes Willard as a product of her times, who demonstrated
much myopia on racial questions, but whose organization offered
some positive experiences for black members.

In a departure from her focus on women's rhetoric in temperance,
Mattingly devotes chapter five to newspaper accounts of
temperance women.  On balance, she observes journalists to
report most generously when a sensational angle appeared.  Their
accounts were sizable if they could report on Bloomers and
masculine behavior on the podium when they expected conventional
ladylike demeanor.  They attacked spinster Susan B. Anthony
regularly for claiming to understand the effect of alcohol abuse
on family life. Sometimes, however, newspapers sympathized with
women reformers, even if they were aggressors against
saloonkeepers, as long as they were seen as victims of alcohol.
Frances Willard was generally painted as a "womanly"  speaker.
An important strength of this chapter is the wide range of
sources, from the New York Times to Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Chicago Times, Baltimore American, Cincinnati Daily Enquirer,

St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Minneapolis Tribune.

Part three is probably the most impressive section of this book,
for its thoroughness in collecting women's fiction of the 1840s
and 1850s.  Among the roster of authors discussed is Lydia
Sigourney, Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline
Maria Sedgwick, Caroline Lee Hentz, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
Susan Warner, Laura Somerville, and S.A.  Southworth. Titles
examined include _Nora Wilmot: A Tale of Temperance and Woman's
Rights_ by Henrietta Rose, Southworth's _Inebriate's Hut_, and
Somerville's _Price of a Glass of Brandy_.  Louisa May Alcott's
_Little Women_ and _Silver Pitchers_ are examined for portrayal
of the virtues of abstenance. All are praised for their explicit
discussion of previously delicate subjects.  Mattingly notes
that many of these novelists rejected the literary convention of
closing the story with a happily-ever-after wedding.  Instead,
they open with a wedding and demonstrated that miserable
marriages soon ensued when the husband was a drinker.

Mattingly succeeds in surveying the terrain she aims to
illuminate.  Yet one might wish for additional arenas for
exploration.  For instance, there is tantalyzing reference, all
too brief, to late nineteenth century changes in temperance
novels, when business is praised at the time that Frances
Willard is increasingly pro-labor.  Another suggestion, that
men's temperance novels exhibited different emphases, including
women who were drinkers, makes the reader wish for a chapter
that compares temperance fiction by women vs. men. In all, this
volume does not address organizational dimensions of temperance
clubs and societies, but does keep its promise, to document and
characterize the prose employed by women in their fight against
the demon rum.

Review Commissioned by Gayle Gullett, Arizona State University.

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