Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader.

• Author: Theodore, Alisse
• Position: Book Review

Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader. Edited with an introduction by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001; pp. xii + 288. $35.00.

That Carol Mattingly recovers some of the temperance fiction in this collection from nineteenth-century gift books seems appropriate; her Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader is a gift to those of us interested in U.S. women's history. But this book may also be of interest to scholars who study advocacy and persuasion more broadly. Many of the temperance essays included in the collection can be read together as a case which illustrates the relevance of some fiction to sociopolitical change, and many can--and should--be read as creative examples of people using non-traditional methods to educate or advocate for their cause.

Water Drops from Women Writers features nineteen texts that range from three to thirty-one pages. Readers are treated to stories from writers contemporary scholars will recognize, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as stories from prolific writers who have become obscure with the passage of time. Thirteen of the essays are complete stories and six are excerpts; the earliest was first published in 1833, the latest in 1887. Although all of the stories prize temperance, the strategies advocated to achieve that goal are as varied as private female influence in the domestic sphere and woman suffrage.

Mattingly organizes the selections into three parts: "Family Relationships," "Legal Inequities," and "Women's Roles." She explains that these are "the three primary themes in women's temperance fiction" and that, despite "a great deal of overlap," grouping the essays in this way "provide[s] as clear a picture as possible of the overall nature of women's temperance fiction" (9). This division, the most appropriate for a collection like this one, makes sense and is helpful. But as a rhetorical critic I became particularly interested in the ways these stories advocate sociopolitical change: some essays point out legal, political, economic, and other injustices; a few offer women role models who border on the maverick; several suggest more traditional means of influence; and some essays attempt to educate people about the perils of intemperance (of course stories overlap in this rubric, too).

In the first category, for example, belong two chapters from Sweet Cicely or Josiah Allen as a Politician, by Marietta...