2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

As the largest avowedly political movement of women in the post-Reconstruction United States, The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) continues to stand at the center of narratives about women’s “entry” into politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.  Now, thirty years after Ruth Bordin’s synthesis of women and temperance reform and numerous organizational case studies revolving around race and place (including those by Peggy Pascoe, Glenda Gilmore, and Nancy Hewitt), the time is ripe to reconsider the history of the movement, and its place in U.S. political history.  Together, the papers on this panel re-evaluate the role of the WCTU in communities of color and national politics, and the roles African American and American Indian women and men played in the movement.  They raise broader questions about how locating race, nation, sexuality (and liquor) at the center of discussions of women’s political activism might change narratives about the sources, chronology, course, keywords, and questions of women’s (and men’s) political and reform history.  In particular, the panel raises questions about the difficulties of political organizing—and historical scholarship—around family and community experiences of domestic, sexual, and racial violence.  It also works toward a model of multiracial political history that is attentive to the specifics of local and cultural histories, while attending to the issues, strategies, and discourses that brought women into national organization.