Hola!  See Jack S. Blocker, Jr., 'Give to the Winds Thy Fears': The Women's
Temperance Crusade, 1873-74 -- the story of the uprising that started in the
Midwest and spread to include as many as 50,000 women in every state and
almost every territory in the U.S., and that led to the WCTU.
Reading the women's stories, they certainly were not all middle class.

Btw, it credits the start of the uprising to, fittingly for our listserv,
Ohio -- and to a man.  For a different origin story dating the first
uprising several months earlier in 1873, started by a woman journalist and
lawyer who then wrote a "how-to" story about it in the national Woman's
Journal, see my On Wisconsin Women: Working for Their Rights From Settlement
to Suffrage (now in reprint).

____________________________
Genevieve G. McBride, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"Let all the dreamers wake the nation. . . ."
                                           Carly Simon




On 9/27/06, Gretchen Pierce <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> As some of you might know, I'm writing my dissertation on the
> anti-alcohol campaign in Mexico in the 1920s and 30s.  I'm examining it
> on the national, state, and local levels.  I have found lots of great
> comparative literature, but I've found that most people talk about
> temperance movements from above (either from the point of view of
> governments or of upper/middle class reformers).  Can anyone point me
> to a body of literature from any region, any time period, that looks at
> popular temperance movements?
>
> Thanks,
> Gretchen Pierce
> Adjunct Instructor
> Indiana University Northwest
> Ph.D. Candidate
> University of Arizona
>