Let's Hear the Women!

 The Temperance Movement was a reform movement that wanted to reduce alcohol consumption. Many women got involved in this movement who were witnessing the negative effects of alcohol by their husbands who would return to them drunk.  Amelia Bloomer was one reformer from the Temperance movement who published her own newspaper titled "The Lily" is the mid 19th century in order to express her opinions on this matter (as well as other subjects) and get people to join her efforts in temperance. This newspaper is from someone who is involved very much in this movement during the time period.I recently found a copy of one of her papers and selected a few excerpts below. During this time period, you could see many liquor selling places on every block. Alcohol was extremely popular. By this time, people were now starting to drink hard liquor and a lot more of it. This caused men to come home and act wrongly to their wives. Divorce wasn't so popular at this time, so many women were left feeling scared and trapped with their husbands.

The excerpts below are just very small parts to the whole newspaper. The full newspaper can be found  here and gives the reader a complete picture of the event because it has so much good detail and it is coming from Amelia Bloomer from the specific time period. 

In the excerpt above, Amelia Bloomer is trying to engage everyone into this movement. She refers to alcohol as evil and wants to "rid" the land of it. She shows her emotional involvement with this quote. She also shows how she the issues keep growing and becoming more consistent and worse as the time is going on and people are discovering hard liquor. 

I think this excerpt above is evidence to what I mentioned before about how men would come home and abuse their wife. Men had a sense of power of women during this time and Amelia Bloomer wants to let people know that women should not accept being treated harshly when their husbands are under the influence of alcohol. 

This last excerpt really shows how strongly she believes that the issue is mostly men who don't have empathy for their wives or who don't respect or understand their wives. All in all, I think it was the people like Amelia Bloomer who was able to gather people form all walks of society into this movement by her meaningful publications of "The Lily".

Primary Source Citation:
Bloomer, Amelia. The Lily, May 01, 1854. Accessed January 21, 2015.     http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p267401coll36/id/619