Manhood Lost - Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the N ...

Elaine Frantz Parsons

• 21 september 2009
• 9780801892561

Samenvatting:

Entering a distinctively male space-the saloon-to rescue fathers, brothers, and sons, women at the same time began to enter another male bastion-politics-again justifying their transgression in terms of rescuing the nation's manhood.

In fiction, drama, poems, and pamphlets, nineteenth-century reformers told and retold the familiar tale of the decent young man who fell victim to demon rum: Robbed of his manhood by his first drink, he slid inexorably into an abyss of despair and depravity. In its discounting of the importance of free will, argues Elaine Frantz Parsons, this story led to increased emphasis on environmental influences as root causes of drunkenness, poverty, and moral corruption—thus inadvertently opening the door to state intervention in the form of Prohibition.

"A lively and sophisticated intellectual history . . . Manhood Lost furnishes new evidence for the centrality of the drink debate to nineteenth-century culture."—Journal of American History

"Manhood Lost deserves a wide readership among historians of gender, temperance, and the nineteenth-century United States."—Journal of the Early Republic

"A fresh perspective on the ways in which nineteenth-century participants in America's temperance debate understood the roles of men and women and the relationships between individuals and their environment."—History of Education Quarterly

"An intriguing, well written, and thought-provoking study that deserves a wide audience among American cultural historians."—American Nineteenth Century History

In fiction, drama, poems, and pamphlets, nineteenth-century reformers told the familiar tale of the decent young man who fell victim to demon rum: Robbed of his manhood by his first drink, he slid inevitably into an abyss of despair and depravity. In its discounting of the importance of free will, argues Elaine Frantz Parsons, this story led to increased emphasis on environmental influences as root causes of drunkenness, poverty, and moral corruption-thus inadvertently opening the door to state intervention in the form of Prohibition. Parsons also identifies the emergence of a complementary narrative of "female invasion"-womanhood as a moral force powerful enough to sway choice. As did many social reformers, women temperance advocates capitalized on notions of feminine virtue and domestic responsibilities to create a public role for themselves. Entering a distinctively male space-the saloon-to rescue fathers, brothers, and sons, women at the same time began to enter another male bastion-politics-again justifying their transgression in terms of rescuing the nation's manhood.