Woman and Wine | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 24, 1871

Woman and Wine.

WOMAN has never been associated with wine without disgrace and disaster. The toast and the bacchanal that, with musical alliteration, couple these two words, spring from the hot lips of sensuality, and are burdened with shame. A man who can sing of wine and woman in the same breath, is one whose presence is disgrace, and whose touch is pollution. A man who can forget mother and sister, or wife and daughter, and wantonly engage in a revel in which the name of woman is invoked to heighten the pleasures of the intoxicating cup, is, beyond controversy, and without mitigation, a beast. “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Ay, cakes and ale, if you will, but let it be cakes and ale. Let not the name by which we call the pure and precious ones at home be brought in to illuminate a degrading feast.

Of the worst foes that woman has ever had to encounter, wine stands at the head. The appetite for strong drink in man has spoiled the lives of more women—ruined more hopes for them, scattered more fortunes for them, brought to them more shame, sorrow, and hardships—than any other evil that lives. The country numbers tens of thousands—nay, hundreds of thousands—of women who are widows to-day, and sit in hopeless weeds, because their husbands have been slain by strong drink. There are hundreds of thousands of homes, scattered all over the land, in which women live lives of torture, going through all the changes of suffering that lie between the extremes of fear and despair, because those whom they love, love wine better than they do the women they have sworn to love. There are women by thousands who dread to hear at the door the step that once thrilled them with pleasure, because that step has learned to reel under the influence of the seductive poison. There are women groaning with pain, while we write these words, from bruises and brutalities inflicted by husbands made mad by drink. There can be no exaggeration in any statement made in regard to this matter, because no human imagination can create anything worse than the truth, and no pen is capable of portraying the truth. The sorrows and the horrors of a wife with a drunken husband, or a mother with a drunken son, are as near the realization of hell as can be reached in this world, at least. The shame, the indignation, the sorrow, the sense of disgrace for herself and her children, the poverty—and not unfrequently the beggary—the fear and the fact of violence, the lingering, life-long struggle and despair of countless women with drunken husbands, are enough to make all women curse wine, and engage unitedly to oppose it everywhere as the worst enemy of their sex.

And now what shall we see on the New-Year’s day, 1871? Women all over the city of New York—women here and there all over the country, where like social customs prevail—setting out upon their tables the well-filled decanters which, before night shall close down, will be emptied into the brains of young men and old men, who will go reeling to darker orgies, or to homes that will feel ashamed of them. Woman’s lips will give the invitation, woman’s hand will fill and present the glass, woman’s careless voice will laugh at the effects of the mischievous draught upon their friends, and, having done all this, woman will retire to balmy rest, previously having reckoned the number of those to whom she has, during the day, presented a dangerous temptation, and rejoiced over it in the degree of its magnitude.

O woman! woman! Is it not about time that this thing were stopped? Have you a husband, a brother, a son? Are they stronger than their neighbors who have, one after another, dropped into the graves of drunkards? Look around you, and see the desolations that drink has wrought among your acquaintances, and then decide whether you have a right to place temptation in any man’s way, or do ought to make a social custom respectable which leads hundreds of thousands of men into bondage and death. Why must the bottle come out everywhere? Why can there not be a festal occasion without this vulgar guzzling of strong drink?

Woman, there are some things that you can do, and this is one: You can make drinking unpopular and disgraceful among the young. You can utterly discountenance all drinking in your own house, and you can hold in suspicion every young man who touches the cup. You know that no young man who drinks can safely be trusted with the happiness of any woman, and that he is as unfit as a man can be for woman’s society. Have this understood: that every young man who drinks, is socially proscribed. Bring up your children to regard drinking as not only dangerous, but disgraceful. Place temptation in no man’s way. If men will make beasts of themselves, let them do it in other society than yours. If your mercenary husbands treat their customers from private stores kept in their counting-rooms, shame them into decency by your regard for the honor of your home. Recognize the living, terrible fact that wine has always been, and is to-day, the curse of your sex; that it steals the hearts of men away from you; that it dries up your prosperity; that it endangers your safety; that it can only bring you evil. If social custom compels you to present wine at your feasts, rebel against it, and make a social custom in the interests of virtue and purity. The matter is very much in your own hands. The women of the country, in what is called polite society, can do more to make the nation temperate than all the legislators and tumultuous reformers that are struggling and blundering in their efforts to this end. At any rate, if they will try, they shall have Scribner’s Monthly to help them.—Scribner’s Monthly.