Thank you for these insights and this tip to the collection on the
temperance movement, which is now on my to-do list.
Re the interrelationships of women in abolitionism, temperance, and
suffragism, it is explored in some women's history works -- including mine
on Wisconsin women reformers, On Wisconsin Women: Working for Their Rights
from Settlement to Suffrage (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Where
else would the nation's longest-lasting "temperance sheet" -- published and
edited by a woman for most of its forty-year tenure -- have endured, never
having turned the state or even its own town dry? (A town not far from
Milwaukee, which the leading abolitionist editor, also a temperance
activist, called "a constellation of accursed grog hells" -- which still
could describe my Milwaukee today.)
Wisconsin, of course, is the state that raised Frances Willard. A
lesser-known but fascinating example of one of the women involved in many
reform movements, discussed in my book, was Emma Curtiss Bascom, wife of the
famed president of the University of Wisconsin. She was state president of
the WCTU and the suffrage association at the same time . . . but the Bascoms
soon had to leave the state, in part because of their temperance activism.
John Bascom is said to have authored a temperance tract popular nationwide,
also said to have been inspired by the student drunkenness that he witnessed
in Madison -- another town that to this day has far more grog hells than
faculty. That didn't sit well with the original Milwaukee brewers on the UW
board of regents, apparently -- another story to be explored at greater
length than I could do in my book. Cheers --
Genni McBride
________________________
Genevieve G. McBride, Ph.D.
Director of Women's Studies and
Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
"Let all the dreamers wake the nation. . . ."
Carly Simon
On 6/14/06, Crowley, John <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> A few years ago in THE SERPENT IN THE BOTTLE, a collection of essays on
> American temperance from UMass Press, I published a possibly relevant
> article: "Slaves to the Bottle": John Gough and Frederick Douglass."
> Their autobiographies appeared the very same year, 1845. This piece, mainly
> on John Gough, also took the race issue insofar as I noted the surprising
> absence of slavery rhetoric in Gough and, by extension, in Northern
> temperance literature, for fear of alienating the Southern wing. I also
> noted literature, cited first in Rorabaugh, which argued that intemperance
> was worse than slavery. This temperance "silence' is particularly notable
> because the contemporaneous women's movement borrowed the slavery trope
> liberally.
>
>
>
> In general, American reformers in the nineteenth century seem to have
> belonged to the women's movement and the abolition movement AND the
> temperance movement. Because of the very odd "repression" of the last by
> the vast majority of the hip scholarly community in our time, the full
> meaning of these interconnections has never, to my knowledge, been studied.
> Until academe derepresses temperance, the situation will not change until
> our work makes bigger and bigger dents. Why this "repression"? I will save
> my theory for another time.
>
>
>
> In my essay, I reconsidered the references to drinking in Douglass and
> then tracked his tour to Ireland, Scotland, and England in 1846, reading all
> his lectures. I found that Douglass subtly leaked the fact that he himself
> had been an inebriate during slavery, indeed during the mildest time in
> slavery under Mr. Freeman. He never says it all in one place; it's as if he
> was confessing serially to something he did not want to say straight out.
> I've never seen my essay cited anywhere, and I heard it shouted down by a
> vested-interest (white) Douglass scholar when I first presented it at a
> conference. Contrarily, I heard from a friend in the rehab business that
> his suggesting to African American alcoholics that Douglass too had had a
> drinking problem often gave them additional hope. If you are interested,
> please read the essay and make up your own mind.
>
>
>
> I am quite confident, however, about my findings, however politically
> incorrect or inconvenient they may be; and at the very least I have raised
> an biographical issue about Douglass that needs to be resolved by more
> specialized scholars. Meanwhile, I would love to see more scholarly action
> on the boundaries of the women's, abolition, and temperance movements.
>
>
>
> John W. Crowley, Professor of English, University of Alabama
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *From:* Alcohol and Drugs History Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> *On Behalf Of *Ambler, Charles
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 01, 2006 12:52 AM
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* Re: liquor as white privilege
>
>
>
>
>
> We're straying slightly from the question here, but I think one has to be
> careful about how widely we generalize from sources like Douglass's
> autobiography, the first part of which was after all conceived as an
> anti-slavery statement. It is also entirely possible to place Christmas
> drinking in a long tradition that would reach into English traditions (here
> we're touching on the debate especially in the 1980s in English social
> history on the tension between "popular expression" and "social control". It
> certainly stretches forward into other highly racialized contexts like
> southern Africa. There in the 19th and 20th century there was an on-going
> tension between those (typically employers) who saw drinking on weekends and
> holidays as an opportunity to workers to relax, take a break, etc. (possibly
> be further tied to the employer through debt) and those (typically
> officials, some missionaries, white settlers) who saw drinking as
> dangerously volatile--as places where the rituals of obeiscance might be
> overturned, as the source of dangerous sexuality and criminality and where
> mob action might be fomented.
>
> Regarding the whiteness question, an earlier posting mentioned Jon Crush
> and my book, Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, and the introductory essay
> which does consider the question at least indirectly. As do a couple of
> essays on Zimbabwe by Michael West (and my individual chapter in Liquor and
> Labor. Where it really surfaces is in the long effort to reserve certain
> kinds of drinks as exclusively "white". In Africa as a whole this meant all
> spirits with a long effort made to argue that these were unsuitable for
> African consumption. But in british east, central and southern Africa,
> Africans were forbidden to consume "European" type beer and wine. This had
> less to do, I would argue, with Africans being forbidden these products
> (which were no stronger than the "traditional" drinks they were permitted)
> and everything to do with defining them as "white" and reserving them for
> white consumption. The fights about relaxing these bans in the 1940s and
> 1950s--1960s in South Africa are quite illustrative of this.
>
> Chuck Ambler
> Univ. of Texas at El Paso
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society on behalf of Padma Manian
> Sent: Wed 5/31/2006 2:28 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
>
> Frederick Douglass in his autobiography noted that slaves were given a
> week's holiday from the day after Christmas until the New Year's Day. During
> this time, masters induced slaves to drink, in fact, encouraged them to
> abuse it and frowned upon slaves who preferred to work and earn a little bit
> of money, and on those who were preferred to be sober. Masters placed bets
> on which slave could drink more than any other and encouraged rivalry among
> slaves. Douglass noted that sobriety and useful work were thought to awaken
> rebelliousness. On the other hand, masters believed that giving slaves a
> false sense of liberty by indulging them to excessively drink would by the
> end of the week disgust slaves that they would gladly return to "arms of
> slavery".
>
> Padma Manian
> San Jose City College, San Jose, CA
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: S Powell
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 9:39 AM
> Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
>
>
> For what it is worth, I am of the impression that during the period of
> American Slavery in the deep south, the slaves were not "permitted" or at
> least given alcohol because the slave masters worried about their behavior
> when intoxicated. I seem to remember there were exceptions to this on the
> plantations but for the most part it was generally desirable to keep alcohol
> away from them.
> This would certainly lend to a sense of "whiteness" and privilege in
> Antebellum Southern American White Culture. I cannot speak to the Canadian
> culture...
>
> As for sources, I am on the road and do not have access to sources...
>
> Regards,
>
> Steve Powell
> Odessa Pictures, Inc.
> View our Demo Reel Online at:
> http://odessapictures.com/
> Tel: +1.716.316.6710
> On May 28, 2006, at 12:48 PM, Robert Campbell wrote:
>
>
> Hello,
> A colleague of mine has asked about secondary literature on liquor as
> a white privilege, particularly in the Canadian context. My work certainly
> has assumed that privilege, but it does not discuss how access to alcohol
> can be part of the process of creating "whiteness."
> Regards,
> Robert Campbell
>
>
> Robert A. Campbell, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> Capilano College
> 2055 Purcell Way
> North Vancouver, BC
> Canada V7J 3H5
> 604.986.1911 x2477
> FAX 604.990.7838
> [log in to unmask]
>
>