"Hearts Uplifted and Minds Refreshed": The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Production of Pure Culture in the United States, 1880-1930

Abstract

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union's (WCTU) Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art, established in 1883, worked for legal censorship, but also created a "pure" literary, artistic, and popular culture. This WCTU program blurs the distinctions some historians have made between producers of culture and their audience(s) or, alternatively, between repressive censors and creative artists. This article documents the WCTU's publication of its own children's magazine, distribution of cheap reproductions of famous paintings, and promotion and production of educational pro-temperance movies. Moral transformation of youth, activists argued, could only occur through the positive influence of a pure culture. As WCTU women pursued a strategy of supporting and producing culture, they made crucial contributions to shaping the public arena in the United States. Asserting their right to be the arbiters of culture themselves, women reformers insisted upon a tie between art and morals.

Historical Images and Reviews of Substance Use and Substance Abuse in the Teaching of Addiction Studies

“…The reformers of the American temperance movement, for instance, understood the utility of images in addressing what they regarded as the social problems associated with alcohol consumption. In fact, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1883 established a Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art, which endeavored to promote legal censorship and adopted strategies to foster a linkage between art and morals, including later advocating for the production of pro-temperance educational movies (Parker, 1999). The WCTU felt this would help create a "pure" culture that, in turn, would facilitate the moral transformation of youth in America.…”

“The Offspring of Drunkards”: Gender, Welfare, and the Eugenic Politics of Birth Control and Alcohol Reform in the United States

“…The WCTU had its own Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art, which supported censorship of materials deemed immoral, while the larger organization worked for stricter prostitution reform laws and to raise the age of sexual consent in nearly every state. 27 But their concerns about sex and exploitation did not include openly advocating for legal birth control. 28 Further, anti-Prohibition supporters often framed their stance not through the rhetoric of civil liberties or personal right, but rather by employing the same arguments of home protectionism and anti-immigrant, anti-criminal sentiments that temperance advocates had used for decades.…”

Cultivating the Taste of the Nation: The National Council of Women of Canada and the Campaign against “Pernicious” Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

“…In an attempt to unpack the complexity of issues regarding "pernicious" literature, this discussion draws on the arguments of Michael Denning (1987), Nan Enstad (1999), and Alison Parker (1997Parker ( , 1999, who collectively argue that debates over popular literature in Britain and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century were part and parcel of a larger cultural struggle between the "genteel" tradition and an emergent "sensational" mass culture. Denning explains that the boundary separating genteel and sensational culture was a "moral as well as aesthetic one, dividing the culture of the 'middle class' from the ways of the 'lower classes,' and giving very different inflections to apparently similar stories" (1987, p. 59).…”