Abstract
Abstract This article considers Victorian concerns about the rise of secret drinking amongst respectable women. These new, apparently dangerous, practices were blamed on licensed grocers and even railway station refreshment rooms. Understandings of different male and female natures went hand in glove with anxieties about the potential effects of drinking. That alcohol might be consumed in secret, at home, triggered concerns about the shameful state of womanhood and the risks for the domestic space and state of the family. This secrecy, and an apparent absence of reliable evidence as to the scale of the problem, is central to the methodological challenge and argument in this article. Using their knowledge of and putative responsibilities for the private sphere, women in the temperance movement organized against the grocer. The article analyses published accounts of women’s work in the Church of England Temperance Society, the British Women’s Temperance Association, and Women’s Total Abstinence Union. It argues that their efforts, rooted in private and domestic imperatives, tested the social and spatial reach of women’s reform work. Acting against the grocer helped women to articulate a distinctively public model of sober citizenship.
Highlights
TEMPERANCE, SECRECY AND SHAMEIn women it [drinking] is not often a social vice: men frequently become drunkards from the allurements of association rather than a love of the drink itself
Members were often bound by collective cultural practices such as processions and different, though divisive, versions of a pledge to abstain from spirits, say, or all alcohol
When inebriate home manager Mr Riley was pushed to outline why he was appearing as a witness, he explained that he had read in a newspaper that the commission lacked evidence of a link between the grocer and increased drunkenness
Summary
In women it [drinking] is not often a social vice: men frequently become drunkards from the allurements of association rather than a love of the drink itself. Attempts to drive down personal demand for alcohol were, from the 1850s and 1860s, accompanied by demands for state action to restrict its public supply.[5] Drinking was understood as ‘a problem of milieu’, of social and spatial relations, notes James Kneale.[6] The proliferation and visibility of pubs in cities made them, and the system that licensed them, a temperance target.[7] And if women were guilty of secretive and solitary drinking, as the epigraph from Clara Lucas Balfour warned, the flow of alcohol from licensed spaces into the home needed to be stopped.[8] This article shows how female reformers applied their knowledge and domestic responsibility to claim and train others in that work. 422 Sober Citizenship, Shame and Secret Drinking women’s associational culture.[18] Women’s contributions to the temperance press represent an especially important ‘underexplored resource’, to quote Gemma Outen Such publications, I argue, reveal how women organized and practiced their sober citizenship through campaigns against issues such as secret drinking, settling their putative domestic responsibilities alongside an urgent sense of public duty.[19]. Battling the secret drinker importantly shaped a geography of temperance action beyond the private sphere, which allowed women to test the definition as well as the public reach of their citizenly responsibilities and reform identities
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