While moral and medical perspectives have dominated addiction discourse for the past two centuries, addiction specialists and theorists have recently developed ecological alternatives that cross disciplinary boundaries and treat the addicted person holistically. My dissertation excavates a deep history of ecological thinking on addiction in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charles Dickens, Frank J. Webb, and Lydia Sigourney countered traditional moral conceptions of intemperance by materially linking mental and physical states to environmental conditions, social structures, and economic systems. In doing so, they combined multiple discourses—ranging from psychology, political and domestic economy, proto-thermodynamics, and physiology—to envision a new ecological model of selfhood that challenged Enlightenment notions of self-mastery and liberal subjectivity. This process included not only the pathologization of addiction but the emergence of a networked self. My dissertation moves chronologically from the Early Republican period to the eve of the Civil War; it focuses on novels (particularly sentimental genres), but also includes poetry, sermons, journalism, and visual artifacts. Chapter 1 explores the intersections of mind, republican politics, and intemperance in the writings of Brown and Benjamin Rush. Chapter 2 contends that lady drunkard narratives by Sigourney and others troubled domestic ideology by embedding addiction in the spousal dynamics, traumas, and medical practices of the home. Focusing on Davis and Dickens, Chapter 3 investigates how agency and addiction pathology were reimagined in the toxic urban-industrial environments of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 argues that Frank J. Webb and the African American press resisted early racialized formations of addiction by depicting drunkenness and white supremacy as conjoined pathologies. The ongoing opioid crisis in the U.S. underscores the importance of not just engaging these early histories to better understand the construction of addiction, but the necessity of balancing networked complexity with the lived experience of those who suffer. I believe that literature is well suited for this task, as it affords psychological, somatic, and social approaches that neuroscience and medicine cannot handle alone. / 2026-02-09T00:00:00Z

Between 1880 and 1900, the Oregon Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) significantly impacted the lives of Oregon women. Not simply an organization of middle class white women, the Oregon WCTU enlisted Native American and African American women, and persistently advocated for improved conditions for working women. The WCTU aspired to be more than a simple temperance union, taking on a broad social agenda which had as its goal the social emancipation of women. It successfully secured positive changes for women in the areas of sexuality, labor, personal safety, education, and prison life in addition to successfully advocating several temperance issues on the state and national level. The union also served to solidify the bond between women, mobilizing them into a social class. Despite their commitment to improving the lives of women, not all WCTU members were supportive of the suffrage movement. Open conflict between the WCTU and the state suffrage association, led by Abigail Scott Duniway, highlights the complexity of women's politics in Oregon at the end of the nineteenth century. Divisions between women on the issues of suffrage and temperance reveal early disagreements as to the best route to increased freedom for women. Such division led to a delay in achieving equal suffrage in the state of Oregon. Despite their disenfranchisement, women's work in the public arena shaped the development of communities and the state of Oregon. Through petition circulation, public speaking, industrial schools, labor union organization, and political lobbying, Oregon women influenced the decisions made by voting men. The activities of Oregon women at the end of the nineteenth century suggest that women wielded political power long before they gained the right to vote. / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Adelaide, 1978. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 97-102).

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 105 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105).

From alarm about the prospect of ‘twenty-four drinking’ to campaigns for a minimum price per unit, the last decade has shown that alcohol consumption is an inflammatory issue in this country. It has become commonplace to hear that drinking is ‘out of control’ and that it is a new and worsening problem largely unique to Britain. However, comparative research reveals that alcohol consumption in Britain is not unusually high and even a cursory glance at history shows that extreme bouts of alarm about drinking have been common on these shores since at least the eighteenth century. What is at the root of this national neurosis about alcohol? This thesis considers the historical development of both public attitudes to alcohol and laws relating to alcohol in England and Wales. Covering issues of crime, disorder, health and immorality, it investigates the various means through which alcohol has been constructed as a social problem through time. This qualitative focus on change and continuity in history allows for the attitudinal and legal impact of certain key developments to be assessed. Particular attention is paid to the Victorian temperance movement which, drawing especially on the ideas of Hunt and Ruonavaara, is characterised as a moral regulation project. It is argued that, although the temperance movement itself declined in the early twentieth century, the moral regulation project it initiated continues, in certain ways, to shape public attitudes towards drinking and the legal regulation of alcohol in the present day. Rather than being a response to contemporary behavioural trends, this thesis proposes that continuing anxieties, apparent in how we think about and regulate alcohol, are more usefully understood as a hangover from the Victorian period.

This thesis present three studies that aim to investigate and compare different definitions of standard drinks and alcohol intake recommendations worldwide and explore University students' knowledge of, attitudes toward, and use of unit-based guidelines in the UK. Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with a range of economic, social and health problems. Heavy drinking patterns among University students are well documented. Like most developed countries, the UK government introduced the “sensible drinking” message and guidelines for alcohol consumption to encourage people to reduce their drinking. The first study was a review of official definitions of standard drinks and guidelines of 57 countries. Analyses showed a lack of international consensus in terms of the size of “standard drinks” or recommended daily or weekly maximum alcohol intake. The results suggested that a global system of units and low risk drinking guidelines could help people make better-informed choices about alcohol consumption and help consistency among researchers, health professionals and governments developing public health initiatives. The second study used an online survey to examine the multivariate correlates of motivation to use guidelines and accuracy of estimates of alcohol consumption among 640 students aged 18-37. Results showed that motivation and ability to accurately estimate the unit content of beverages were linked to various cognitive and behavioural variables such as conscientiousness and extraversion, familiarity with, and frequency of use of the guidelines and perceptions of how easy and useful the unit-based guidelines are. The third study employed semi-structured interviews in a sample of 12 students selected from the second sample. Thematic analysis revealed that participants were not motivated to adhere to the guidelines and lacked skills to apply them to manage their own drinking. Findings suggest that multifaceted public health interventions should include provision of information, efforts to motivate young people to change their behaviour, and strategies to develop skills for managing alcohol consumption.

The introduction of a Thomistic framework to contemporary models of addiction provides new insight that may prove useful in efforts toward therapy and understanding. Aquinas's conception of the human soul and its proper functioning contrasts with the suggested disordered functioning of the addict's soul in such a way that this may prove useful for addicts attempting to interpret their physical, psychological, and moral feelings or intuitions. This framework can then be related to the common contemporary addiction therapy found in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve Step programs in order to provide a greater understanding of what psychological and moral processes may be at work within the addict with the hope that greater understanding will lead to more effective therapy.

This dissertation deals with temperance in rural economically backward communities in the county of Västerbotten in Northern Sweden. Most Swedish historians have related the rapid break-through of organized temperance to industrialization and industrial areas. The connection temperance - industrialization is indisputable. The question then arises: why did temperance establish its very strongholds in predominantly rural and backward areas of Northern Sweden? In the referendum over Prohibition in 1922, when the prohibitionists lost their case, the industralized part of Sweden took least interest in the question. In Norrland over 70% and in Vastebotten 81% of the population wanted and voted for Prohibition. The mechanisms of temperance in non-industral areas are dealt wich against this background. Was industrialization seen as a threat to the agrarian communities? How did the commercialization of liquor and wine after 1864 affect small peasant communities and pre-industrial towns, and in which ways and to what extent were these communities ready to defend themselves from the Demon Rum? In the town of Umeå and the southern part of the county of Västerbotten, temperance was able to dominate the left-wing factions of the regional populistic party variations of liberalism and social democracy. These populist parties were genuine prohibition parties and were often in opposition to their own central bureaucracy in Stockholm. They represented, like the American populist movement, a reaction against laissez-faire capitalism and commercialization. With the support of these political parties temperance succeeded in building up Sweden's most severe system of alcohol restrictions - the Umeå system - in 1923. / digitalisering@umu

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karolinska institutet, 2002. / Härtill 6 uppsatser.

Jessie Ackerman was the second world missionary for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Her fascinating life sheds light on the most important issues facing women during this time period. Most WCTU women have been dismissed by twentieth century scholars as being religiously fanatical and conservative. They have been overshadowed by suffragists and other women that we consider more radical by today’s standards. Only in recent years have some feminist historians begun to reexamine the contributions WCTU women made to the suffrage movement and to feminism. The research for this thesis relies heavily on primary sources including Ackerman’s personal papers found in Sherrod Library’s Archives of Appalachia, her three published books,Australia From a Woman’s Point of View, What Women Have Done With the Vote, and The World Through a Woman’s Eyes. Also consulted were issues of the WCTU’s official journal, The Union Signal, from 1887 through 1892.