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Manhood Lost

Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Elaine Frantz Parsons

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In fiction, drama, poems, and pamphlets, nineteenth-century reformers told the familiar tale of the decent young man who fell victim to demon rum: Robbed of his manhood by his first drink, he slid inevitably into an abyss of despair and depravity. In its discounting of the importance of free will, argues Elaine Frantz Parsons, this story led to increased emphasis on environmental influences as root causes of drunkenness, poverty, and moral corruption—thus inadvertently opening the door to state intervention in the form of Prohibition.

Parsons also identifies the emergence of a complementary...

In fiction, drama, poems, and pamphlets, nineteenth-century reformers told the familiar tale of the decent young man who fell victim to demon rum: Robbed of his manhood by his first drink, he slid inevitably into an abyss of despair and depravity. In its discounting of the importance of free will, argues Elaine Frantz Parsons, this story led to increased emphasis on environmental influences as root causes of drunkenness, poverty, and moral corruption—thus inadvertently opening the door to state intervention in the form of Prohibition.

Parsons also identifies the emergence of a complementary narrative of "female invasion"—womanhood as a moral force powerful enough to sway choice. As did many social reformers, women temperance advocates capitalized on notions of feminine virtue and domestic responsibilities to create a public role for themselves. Entering a distinctively male space—the saloon—to rescue fathers, brothers, and sons, women at the same time began to enter another male bastion—politics—again justifying their transgression in terms of rescuing the nation's manhood.

Reviews

Reviews

A lively and sophisticated intellectual history... Manhood Lost furnishes new evidence for the centrality of the drink debate to nineteenth-century culture.

Manhood Lost deserves a wide readership among historians of gender, temperance, and the nineteenth-century United States.

Parsons makes a convincing argument for a much closer connection between discourses of women's rights and temperance in the nineteenth century.

A fresh perspective on the ways in which nineteenth-century participants in America's temperance debate understood the roles of men and women and the relationships between individuals and their environment.

Its findings will be embraced enthusiastically by scholars affiliated with the emergent field of alcohol and addiction studies.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
256
ISBN
9780801892561
Illustration Description
7 halftones
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Volition
Chapter 2. Manhood
Chapter 3. Contentment
Chapter 4. Seduction
Chapter 5. Invasion
Chapter 6. Resolution
Conclusion
Notes
Essays on Sources
Index

Author Bio