Historian’s new book examines cultural attitudes toward women

BOWLING GREEN, O.—While women have made strides toward equal rights in the United States, some cultural attitudes about them haven’t budged much in 200 years.

Striking comparisons can be made, for example, with early 19th-century temperance literature, which Dr. Scott Martin, a Bowling Green State University history professor, examines in his latest book.

In “Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-class Ideology, 1800-1860,” published recently by Northern Illinois University Press, Martin points out the contradiction in the portrayal of women by antebellum temperance reformers, who saw alcohol abuse as a male vice that imperiled women in an increasingly urban, industrial world.

Martin explains “there were competing conceptions of women as both good and evil” in the literature, which painted them as angelic but also as “Eve the temptress leading men astray.”

The image of a wife battered by a drunken husband was common, but writers often hastened to add that male abuse wouldn’t have happened if women hadn’t driven men to taverns with peevish or nagging behavior at home, or offered them “the poisoned cup” themselves, he says.

“Some of these patterns of blaming the victim still do persist,” the author notes. “It takes a long time for these deeply embedded cultural patterns to change,” Martin says, citing the lack of women’s suffrage until 1920. And that was 50 years after the 15th Amendment gave black men the vote, demonstrating the influence of traditional gender roles, he says.

“Devil of the Domestic Sphere” is the second book by the BGSU professor, who also wrote “Killing Time: Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800-1850.” His 1995 book touched on the early 19th-century spike in alcohol consumption—more than twice today’s consumption per capita—that fueled the U.S. temperance movement. That topic intersected with his interest in women’s history and gender to produce the new book.

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(Posted May 15, 2008 )