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This chapter focuses on prohibitionist temperance reform ideology and women's municipal enfranchisement in the early 1880s that worked to incorporate acts of democratic citizenship into the feminine public sphere. Temperance reform, and more specifically prohibition, created space for British women in local electoral democracy. Female temperance reformers' involvement in prohibition presented a greater challenge to gender roles than moral suasion. While moral suasion was related to the idea of women's ‘complementary nature’, where prohibition's stress on a legislative means of temperance reform highlighted the limits of women's public role. The paucity of work on both female temperance reform and the women's movement in Scotland makes it difficult to evaluate the relative importance of prohibition for the politicisation of middle-class women in Scotland. Furthermore, an examination of the British Women's Temperance Association Scottish Christian Union (BWTASCU's) participation in the suffrage campaign demonstrates that constitutional suffragism was composed of a more diverse range of organisations than that which has been acknowledged.

This chapter examines the politicization of Minnesota's temperance movement between the end of the Civil War and the passage of a High License Law in 1887. It shows how Minnesota's temperance activists pushed the temperance cause into the political arena, giving rise to a temperance politics that moved the temperance issue at the center of party, electoral, and state politics. It explains how the popularity of the temperance cause forced both Republicans and Democrats to engage with the arguments of both temperance reformers and opponents involving Irish and German Americans while also carefully negotiating their position within the legal battles about alcohol. It also considers how personal liberty emerged as a contentious issue in the High License debates. These debates led to an equilibrium between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and even provoked the founding of a third party solely geared toward the extinction of the liquor traffic, the Temperance Party of Minnesota. The chapter concludes with a discussion ofd the rise of a women's temperance movement during the period.

This chapter examines the Anti-Saloon League's (ASL) impact on the temperance movement in Minnesota during the period 1898–1915. The turn of the century witnessed a nationwide expansion of temperance activism. The election in 1898 of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Lind, a Swedish immigrant, inaugurated the Progressive era in Minnesota and marked a turning point in the state's temperance history. This chapter considers how the tenets of Progressivism combined with the work of the ASL boosted the passage of County Option Laws not only in Minnesota but also throughout the country. It shows that the ASL's activism and its intense collaboration with the Prohibition Party, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and other reformers led to liquor law enforcement campaigns and slowly increased the general sentiment in favor of County Option. Due to severe resistance to County Option, particularly by the politically powerful liquor interests, but also by German Americans, workers, and other opponents of temperance reform, it took until 1915 until the reformers' combined efforts showed the promised effect.

This chapter examines the emergence of a High License consensus in Minnesota during the period 1888–1897. In the decade after the passage of the High License Law, there was an almost complete standstill of temperance reform in Minnesota due to the existence of a High License consensus. The moderate reformers, the leaders of the Republican Party, and even many of the law's opponents argued in favor of maintaining it. This situation did not change when two groups of Minnesotans joined the radical reformist camp: the Scandinavian Americans and the members of the state's Populist movement. This chapter also discusses the temperance activism of Irish women, with particular emphasis on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's fight for women's rights, and the German Americans' use of the temperance movement to strengthen their ethnic position in American society. Finally, it considers how the High License consensus resulted in greater cooperation among the High License Law's opponents and in the founding of the Minnesota Anti-Saloon League (ASL).

This conclusion ponders the question of whether we are really what we drink by reviewing the insights gained from the analysis of the interwoven and constantly interacting identity discourses, among them ethnic identity, gender, class, civic and religious identity, within Minnesota's temperance movement and by reflecting on the repercussions of these insights on our understanding of identity. The temperance movement served as a catalyst of ethnic identity construction and negotiation for both German and Irish Americans. It caused German Americans to invent and Irish Americans to renegotiate their ethnic identities and to reposition themselves in the Anglo-American society. Intense intraethnic debates on the role of liquor and liquor consumption and the many exhortations and appeals of Irish American temperance reformers fractured long-held beliefs that excessive alcohol consumption was respectable and an integral constituent of Irishness. The campaigns for or against liquor also contributed to the construction of a female public identity and influenced the shape of civic identity in Minnesota.

This chapter examines the consequences of World War I for Minnesota's temperance movement during the period 1916–1919. The specter and, consequently, the reality of military involvement enhanced the tolerance of many Americans toward restrictive liquor laws they would otherwise not have accepted. The chapter considers how the struggle for prohibition became entangled with the United States's looming military efforts in the Great War and how the war provided an opportunity for temperance reformers to fight for the preservation of military discipline in army camps throughout the United States. Reformers insisted that military efficiency could be achieved only through young soldiers' abstinence and purity, an argument that convinced Congress to pass the Hobson-Sheppard bill, the Selective Service Act, and the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act in 1917. In addition, Progressive reformers waged a social purification campaign. In September 1918, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, which would function as the enforcement act of the Eighteenth Amendment. The period also saw the demise of German Americans' opposition to Minnesota's temperance movement.