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

In: Journal of women's history, Band 11, Heft 2, S. 135-158

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.