Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alison M. Parker focuses on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in an effort to revise historical understandings of censorship in the United States. She maintains that most prior histories, written primarily by committed civil libertarians, have portrayed a "Whiggish" progression from nineteenth-century repression to late twentieth-century tolerance. Disproportionately emphasizing Anthony Comstock and his closest collaborators, they have mischaracterized the pro-censorship movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a small group of elite white males whose Victorian prudery generated an obsessive crusade against various forms of sexual expression. As an unfortunate result, they have overlooked the extent to which the American middle class supported censorship as part of a more general confidence that government regulation could promote constructive social change and, ultimately, democratic harmony.

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While situating the WCTU in the mainstream of middle-class Progressive reform, Parker also emphasizes its distinctive reliance, as the largest women's organization in the country, on its maternal role in protecting children, and society generally, from dangerous influences. Maternal activism linked the WCTU's censorship efforts with its more famous campaign for temperance. As mothers and as Progressives, Parker observes, members of the WCTU worried more about immorality and impurity than about Comstock's narrower obsession with obscenity. Frequently invoking metaphors of disease, they asserted that words and images harm individual character, and that novels, journalism, art, and movies about drunkennness, sexual misconduct, and violence cause the immoral activities they depict. The WCTU used the language of science and social purity typical of Progressives to advocate censorship as a method of alleviating this contagion.

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