Sanctifying the Social Body: Temperance, Cholera, and the Gendered Boundaries of Respectability in the Early Republic, 1826–1832
Abstract
This project investigates how the antebellum temperance movement and the public response to the first U.S. cholera epidemic (1832) reflected similar gendered programs of social control during a post-Revolution crisis of authority. I argue that an alliance of clergymen, manufacturers, physicians, and women worked in concert to frame both intemperance and epidemic disease as “pollution” that threatened the nation’s moral order, and that they used these crises to stabilize a new vision of respectable life centered on sober masculinity and a sanctified home. Methodologically, I combine close readings of widely circulated temperance tracts and reform literature with analysis of public commentary on cholera (political statements, urban correspondence, and religious periodicals), then interpret these sources through the lens of anthropologist Mary Douglas’s work on structure, pollution, and the relationship between the “social body” and the “physical body.“ Although historians have not typically identified a connection between temperance and cholera, my analysis suggests important overlap. Temperance rhetoric portrayed alcohol as a force that dissolved rational manhood and imperiled vulnerable wives and children, while cholera discourse cast the diseased poor and intemperate as civic contamination; together, these narratives made bodily breakdown a public sign of moral failure and justified heightened supervision of working-class conduct. By treating certain bodies and appetites as “matter out of place,” reformers converted fear and disgust into campaigns for teetotal discipline, domestic reform, and moral boundary-drawing, revealing how public health emergencies can be used to naturalize social hierarchies and gender norms.
Start Time
15-4-2026 3:30 PM
End Time
15-4-2026 4:30 PM
Room Number
252
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Presentation Subtype
UG Orals
Presentation Category
Arts and Humanities
Student Type
Undergraduate Student
Faculty Mentor
Jennifer Adler
Sanctifying the Social Body: Temperance, Cholera, and the Gendered Boundaries of Respectability in the Early Republic, 1826–1832
252
This project investigates how the antebellum temperance movement and the public response to the first U.S. cholera epidemic (1832) reflected similar gendered programs of social control during a post-Revolution crisis of authority. I argue that an alliance of clergymen, manufacturers, physicians, and women worked in concert to frame both intemperance and epidemic disease as “pollution” that threatened the nation’s moral order, and that they used these crises to stabilize a new vision of respectable life centered on sober masculinity and a sanctified home. Methodologically, I combine close readings of widely circulated temperance tracts and reform literature with analysis of public commentary on cholera (political statements, urban correspondence, and religious periodicals), then interpret these sources through the lens of anthropologist Mary Douglas’s work on structure, pollution, and the relationship between the “social body” and the “physical body.“ Although historians have not typically identified a connection between temperance and cholera, my analysis suggests important overlap. Temperance rhetoric portrayed alcohol as a force that dissolved rational manhood and imperiled vulnerable wives and children, while cholera discourse cast the diseased poor and intemperate as civic contamination; together, these narratives made bodily breakdown a public sign of moral failure and justified heightened supervision of working-class conduct. By treating certain bodies and appetites as “matter out of place,” reformers converted fear and disgust into campaigns for teetotal discipline, domestic reform, and moral boundary-drawing, revealing how public health emergencies can be used to naturalize social hierarchies and gender norms.
