Content area
Full Text
"HEARTS UPLIFTED AND MINDS REFRESHED": The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Production of Pure Culture in the United States, 1880-1930
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.
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union's (WCTU) participation in debates about "pure" culture and the pro-censorship movement, from the 1880s to the 1930s, provides an interesting historical parallel to today's culture wars. 1 Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing activists attack art and media that does not uphold their narrow notion of family values, but instead uses complex, challenging, or disturbing techniques and images to explore such controversial subject matters as sexual identity, race, class, and sexism. 2 The notion of purity and its role in raising children and reforming society was and is widely contested. Past and present activists embrace the dual roles of cultural producer and censor. WCTU reformers, for instance, supported censorship of impure culture and tried to rework the available cultural media by creating their own pure art, which they conceived of as morally upstanding, wholesome culture designed to provide moral uplift and character development for youth. Similarly, even as New Right Christian evangelicals attack Hollywood and mainstream media today, they simultaneously produce numerous cable television programs, videos, and rock music, as well as publish their own literature explicitly designed to replace immoral cultural forms.
This article focuses on the WCTU's Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art, established in 1883, which supported the...