Alcohol and Wife Abuse in Antebellum Male Temperance Literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895380 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jerome Nadelbaft (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1995 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 15-44 |
| Publication date | 1995-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-025-01-02 |
| OpenAlex | W1981325682 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the male-dominated temperance movement, through its association of alcoholism and unrestrained violence, first focused the attention of Americans on wife beating and murder. Temperance societies, in printed speeches and tracts, stimulated government concern and generated official reports, which in turn created both a need and a market for temperance fiction. All drove home the same terrifying points. Although Samuel Cary, Cincinnati's major temperance figure, might have been perceptive in suggesting that "scenes of drunkenness, debauchery, crime, poverty and destitution become familiar and we come to regard them as a matter of course," at least the literature left few people able to plead ignorance of the dangers faced in the home (quoted in Dannenbaum 1984, 173). Alcohol destroyed man's self control, weakened moral influences, and unleashed antisocial passions. "Intemperance brings into operation the worst passions of human nature. Anger, malice, envy, revenge, jealousy, violence, madness and outrage" were only a partial list Manual on Temperance 1852, 13). "The amusements of drinkers are remarkable for their cruelty," Robert Hartley (1851) wrote in an early, lengthy study of the impact of in- temperance in cities and large towns. "Drink, while it deadens the moral sensibilities, lashes the destructive propensities into a morbid excitement
Adultery · Anger · Art · Criminology · Ignorance · Immorality · Jealousy · Literature · Malice · Morality · Outrage · Passions · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Wife · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2002 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |