TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2004//
TI  - “A Star that Gathers Lustre from the Gloom of Night”: Wives, Marriage, and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century American Temperance Reform
JO  - Journal of family history
A1  - Martin, Scott C.
SP  - 274
EP  - 292
VL  - 29
IS  - 3
N2  - 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.<p /> 
LA  - 
SN  - 0363-1990
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0363199004266904
ID  - ref1
ER  -