Research Interests
19th Century Woman's Rights, Activism, and Temperance:
Women came out to protest in the 19th century, often starting with the acceptable temperance reform but pushing beyond the limits prescribed to them even in this most conservative movement. Woman's rights “ultrists” such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Bloomer got their start in the anti-alcohol agenda, joining abolitionists such as Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley, and Sojourner Truth to ensure woman's position become established in the public square. The questions they raised opened the door to post-bellum women's organizations supporting prohibition and suffrage.
Mid Nineteenth-century woman's rights activists: Research focuses on temperance as the initial and/or ongoing interest of activists such as Amelia Bloomer (pictured), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Swisshelm, and others. How did their involvement in the temperance movement and its underlying philosophy respond to their work in the incipient woman's rights movement?
Click here or on Bloomer's picture for links to seminal texts and writing of these activists.
Temperance stories provided formulaic narratives and characters with moralizing endings. Female figures generally received treatment as the "angel in the house," firmly in her gendered domestic sphere, loving her husband with unconditional support even should she become martyr to his destructive alcoholism; girls unwilling to take male (or even their own) sobriety seriously receive the punishment of marrying a dipsomaniac. Women writers often challenged the at-times one-dimensional view of female characters as angel or demon to the male protagonist, putting women at the center and complicating their responses.
Click here or on "Elsie Magoon" for links to temperance-themed texts by Frances Dana Gage, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and other writers.
Temperance’s assumptions concerning a sober population proposed an ideal, not a solution. This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century American literature voiced concern with the social implications of reformist assumptions regarding matters of social inclusion and exclusion predicated on a solution ideal. The chapters to follow will point out literary works that either in theme or in cultural context provoke readers to question assumptions concerning the social status of alcohol-related characters. Beginning with a story of alcohol producers portrayed as in the company of literal demon figures, and moving through figurative descriptions of alcohol-related characters’ (anti)social statuses, the analyses to follow will examine the literary treatment of anti-alcohol ideology in terms of how it affects and effects the representation of social perception (without necessarily endorsing a reformist ideology through narrative decree). My study will focus on the debate temperance mobilized as fertile ground for literary meditations concerning socially assumed inclusions and exclusions of individual characters.
Click on the above dissertation title or "The Drunkard's Progress" picture below to go to my dissertation at the Stony Brook website
