Citation

Martin SC. J. Fam. Hist. 2004; 29(3): 274-292.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, National Council On Family Relations, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0363199004266904

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article argues that wives occupied a more central place than mothers in the early nineteenth-century American temperance movement, and that temperance literature portrayed them in two ways. First, temperance writers depicted the drunkard’s wife as a pitiable example of the dire effects of male drinking on women and families. Second, they cast wives as potent moral influences on their husbands, capable of preventing the sober from faltering and reclaiming the drunkard. These portrayals coexisted with overtly misogynist views of women within the temperance movement that accused women of making men drunkards through perverted influence and blamed drunkard’s wives for their own predicament. The temperance movement’s depiction of wives’gender both reflected and contributed to the larger ambivalence toward women in American society.