Scott C. Martin

“A Star that Gathers Lustre from the Gloom of Night”: Wives, Marriage, and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century American Temperance Reform:

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.

The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (review)

public health interests in forced vaccination. Currently, further polio vaccinations could mean the end of polio as a living disease, but fear of vaccination and loss of will have allowed polio to have a resurgence in Africa and India. Whooping cough was on the wane in America until distrust of the vaccine encouraged middle-class families to avoid vaccination; now the disease threatens the elderly, infants, and the infirm. If it is social history’s self-appointed task to rescue the diversity of voices from the past, that does not mean we have to glamorize everything people have said. Each time I listen to very good reasons not to vaccinate, and each time people decry their responsibility for the spread of whooping cough and rubella, and each time I read about the history of the anti-vaccination movement, I wonder whether some signposting might be just a bit necessary—brave and foolish people inside; consort with at your own risk.