Review by Choice Review
Blocker's study is a monograph in the classic sense: intensive, small scaled, narrowly focused. It explores only one year, although admittedly a critical year, in America's century-long prohibition movement. Blocker surveys the crusade on the national, state, and local levels concluding, anent the latter, that no local case study can capture the full complexity of this virtually exclusive women's movement. He also examines its largely nonviolent range of tactics: local option pressures; the opposition of the suffragists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the reactions of men; the responses of state lawmakers, as well as the five possible models (e.g., social control) that would explain the reason for the crusade. Rejecting all five as inadequate, Blocker concludes that drinking, the local retail liquor business that supported it, and the resulting threat to women were primarily responsible for the movement. Making full use of local newspapers, Blocker employs a variety of analytical tools, but he does not know how to stop using them. There is a curious historical stasis to this study; 1873-1874 has no past, precious little future, no mise-en-scene or feel for historical process. The dismissal of Paul Kleppner's approach is convincing and so, too, the conclusion that the crusade was not class-specific. Graduate readership.-M. Cantor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
