Project Questions

1. What role do women and children play in the message of the temperance reformers featured in this unit? What might a historian studying the antebellum temperance movement deduce about gender and temperance based on these portrayals?
2. What different arguments against drinking do these sources make, and how do they compare to modern anti-drinking appeals?
3. These sources span the years 1790 to 1855. How did the strategies of these reformers change over time?
4. Central Question: What do the strategies of the antebellum temperance movement reveal about how reformers hoped to change American society?