I would add that renewed interest in "wets" and the wet movement for
repeal in recent works, i.e. Kenneth Rose's American Women and the
Repeal of Prohibition and Catherine Murdock's Domesticating Drink,
may be stealing  some of the focus on the drys and the WCTU. Whatever
the current level of interest (or lack of interest) in the WCTU,
there has still been far more scholarship devoted to the drys (WCTU
et. al.) than the wets of WONPR, the AAPA, etc. I imagine the shift
away from the WCTU is not related to the class composition of its
membership so much as it is rooted in a desire to bring some balance
to the historiographical picture by looking at less examined aspects
of the temperance debate.

---------------------------------------------
Michael A. Lerner, Ph.D.
Historian / Research Fellow
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
612-625-5061
[log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]


>>(1) do I have my facts right?
>
>David, I think you have  your facts correct.
>
>>(2) why the decline of interest by
>>historians in the WCTU in the USA (at least as measured by book publication)?
>
>This question is interesting.  The answer probably has as much to do with
>the state of history-writing in the United States as anything else.  The
>answer may be because the WCTU women were not "subaltern" and the fashion
>came to be, by the 1980s, only to write about the oppressed.  In my work, I
>had an occasion to review a syllabus in American women's history about 5
>years ago.  From that syllabus, the students would not know that an upper
>or middle class woman of European ancestry ever set foot on the soil of
>North America!  When I inquired, I was told, "oh, that is not where the
>field is at nowadays" or words to that effect!  Scholars my not be much
>interested in the WCTU because of the composition of its membership.  I
>think there is a lot of ignorance about the WCTU, especially its history
>after the death of Frances Willard when, contrary to what I have seen in
>print, the organization actually grew.
>
>
>
>
>K. Austin Kerr                   e-mail [log in to unmask]
>Professor of History             office (614)292-2613
>Ohio State University            department  292-2674
>Columbus, Ohio 43210 USA         fax    (614)292-2282