Book Review

Since the 1970s, historians have beaten a well-worn path to the topic of women and temperance. Books by Ruth Bordin (1980 and 1986), Barbara Epstein (1981), Jed Dannenbaum (1984), Jack Blocker (1985), and myself (1991) are now joined by three studies that extend social history's fascination with the subject of women and drinking.	1
Carol Mattingly sticks closest to well-traveled routes. A study of the rhetoric of presentation in themes of gender and alcohol among women temperance reformers and in nineteenth-century fiction, Well-Tempered Women is sympathetic to temperance women. Mattingly includes material on pioneering midcentury efforts by Amelia Bloomer and Mary C. Vaughan that have often been overlooked by historians, but she concentrates on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) between 1874 and the conventional closing point of 1900. Mattingly concludes with chapters analyzing popular novels and temperance fiction that presented role models of women taking action to control their own lives and that documented many of the "wrongs" of women's treatment in society and within the family.	2
Mattingly convincingly argues that temperance reformers spoke to the culture of ordinary nineteenth-century women and thus appealed to them; the "rhetoric" critical to this success, Mattingly feels, has not been appreciated. Leaders such as the WCTU national president Frances Willard were skilled with tongue and pen and engaged in a continual performance. Mattingly plays close attention to the leaders' speeches and to their appeal in the language of evangelicalism; she notes also the importance given to conservative dress and the suitable appearance of the women, with Willard a role model of decorum through most of her career. With skillful tactics, conservative action drew women out of the home into politics, reform, self-improvement, and self-confidence.	3
Women are allowed to speak for themselves in this study, but sometimes their rhetoric is long-winded; block quotations occupying much space convey a disjointed appearance to parts of the text. Mattingly's conclusion of conservative means to progressive ends is more than plausible but hardly original in women's reform historiography, while historians might dispute just how successful this strategy was in fostering temperance and women's rights. Mattingly shows that the WCTU's success frayed in the 1890s as its constituency became more diverse and harder to please. In an interesting chapter on temperance rhetoric in race issues, she examines how Willard appeared in 1890 to exonerate lynching and thus brought controversy on herself; the WCTU was denounced by some African Americans, especially Ida Wells-Barnett, as racist but defended by others. But Mattingly exaggerates the conservatism of WCTU rhetoric before 1900, missing its radical and populist tinge, ignores the WCTU's humanitarian and sometimes antiracist work abroad, and does not attempt to explain the rhetorical base of the apparent resurgence of WCTU support after 1900.	. . .