I just wanted to reflect on temperance as an avenue of engagement for women in the early 19th century. My understanding was that Lyman Beecher (father of Catherine, Henry Ward, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabelle Hooker, etc.) was instrumental in starting the 2nd Great Awakening by beginning to hold revivial meetings in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1810. from then till 1824 when Charles Grandison Finney emerged as a competing leader of this movement, Beecher was concerned about the moral climate in America in the early 1800's, especially in view of the diestablishment of state churches. He suspected that without religious moral reinforcement, humans would behave in turbulent, selfish, and unvirtuous ways, undermining democratic governance. As he said, " “We may form free constitutions, but our vices will destroy them; we may enact laws, but they will not protect us.” Recognizing that it was futile to fight against religious disestablishment, Beecher untertook a two-fold task.
The first part of this task was to stir up grass-roots public interest in religious behavior through revivials. To faciliate these cross-denominational revivials, Beecher was in the forefront of the transition from a Congregational theology that emphasized predestination and the inability of individuals to influence their salvation to a more ecumenical evangelism that held that individuals could choose to open themselves up to Jesus's grace and demonstrate their born-again status by living godly lives. This evangelical theology thus promoted the idea that people had the free will to choose to live moral lives, but had also to manifest the self discipline to abjure sinful behavior in order to confirm their salvation. Many of Beecher's converts were women who became eager to act on their resolution to live moral lives.
The second part of Beecher's civic morality task was to encourage the establishment of volunatary mass organizations of spiritual and social reform. Beecher believed that by encouraging these organizations, he was helping to create a dynamic moral climate that would hasten the coming of the millenium. His first target was temperance. Alcoholism was indeed a problem in these years when the average male drank 7 gallons of distilled spirits a year and for some men such drinking had a profound impact of their wives and children, which especially concerned middle class female evangelicals who saw themselves as guardians of the home. Beecher encouraged the establishment of temperance organizations such as the American Temperance Society in 1826. In 1829 there were about 1,000 societies with a membership of approximately 100,000. Women constituted about 50% of the activists in these ATS branches. They initially sought to further the cause of temperance by recruiting new members, holding "dry" picnics and socials, and hosting lysum-style temperance lectures. But moral suasion was usually not a sufficient means of stopping drunkeness, so ATS women increasingly sought to lobby local and state authorities to legally ban the production and sale of alcohol, and in doing so developed political skills. And female temperance activists became concerned about other problems they encountered that were associated with alcoholism, for example prostitution and divorce. In this way, temperance was a feminist pathway from the home to the public square
Geoff Tegnell
7th Grade Social Studies, Curriculum Coordinator, Adjunct Professor