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Religion in North America
Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life
Carry A. NationRetelling the Life
Fran Grace
The story of one of America's most notorious and misunderstood women.
Carry Nation was 54 when she "smashed" her first saloon, but her life before she started her infamous hatchet crusade has been little known until now. In this first scholarly biography of Nation, Fran Grace unfolds a story that often contrasts with the image of Nation as "Crazy Carry," a bellicose, blue-nosed, man-hating killjoy. Using newly available archival materials and placing Nation in her various historical and cultural contexts, Grace "retells" the crusader's tumultuous life.
Brought up in antebellum Kentucky, Nation lived through the devastation of the Civil War and endured a failed marriage to an alcoholic physician. In her early 20s, a single mother and a destitute widow, she experienced a spiritual crisis. Her second marriage, to a much-older David Nation, grew strained under the failure of their Texas farm, her exploration into Holiness religion, and her attempts to work outside the home. When the couple moved to Kansas, Nation's disappointments translated into an agenda for social reform. Frustrated by the rampant violations of the state's prohibition law and empowered by a sense of divine mission, Nation responded with rocks, crowbars, and hatchets. Though much of her last two decades was spent on stage or in jail and in battles with other family members over the future of her unstable adult daughter, she edited two newspapers and founded several homes for abused and needy women.
This complexly woven and delightfully written biography adds depth to the popular image of Carry Nation, situating her at the center of major cultural currents in her time.
Fran Grace is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands.
Religion in North AmericaCatherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
May 2001400 pages, 57 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index, append.cloth 0-253-33846-8 $35.00 s / 26.50
Fran Grace
The story of one of America's most notorious and misunderstood women.
Carry Nation was 54 when she "smashed" her first saloon, but her life before she started her infamous hatchet crusade has been little known until now. In this first scholarly biography of Nation, Fran Grace unfolds a story that often contrasts with the image of Nation as "Crazy Carry," a bellicose, blue-nosed, man-hating killjoy. Using newly available archival materials and placing Nation in her various historical and cultural contexts, Grace "retells" the crusader's tumultuous life.
Brought up in antebellum Kentucky, Nation lived through the devastation of the Civil War and endured a failed marriage to an alcoholic physician. In her early 20s, a single mother and a destitute widow, she experienced a spiritual crisis. Her second marriage, to a much-older David Nation, grew strained under the failure of their Texas farm, her exploration into Holiness religion, and her attempts to work outside the home. When the couple moved to Kansas, Nation's disappointments translated into an agenda for social reform. Frustrated by the rampant violations of the state's prohibition law and empowered by a sense of divine mission, Nation responded with rocks, crowbars, and hatchets. Though much of her last two decades was spent on stage or in jail and in battles with other family members over the future of her unstable adult daughter, she edited two newspapers and founded several homes for abused and needy women.
This complexly woven and delightfully written biography adds depth to the popular image of Carry Nation, situating her at the center of major cultural currents in her time.
Fran Grace is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands.
Religion in North AmericaCatherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
May 2001400 pages, 57 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index, append.cloth 0-253-33846-8 $35.00 s / 26.50
374 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 13, 2021
This was the most fun I've read reading a biography in a long, long time. If you know anything about Carry Nation (maybe if you love Ken Burns docs), you might be tempted to think she's just another crazy early Prohibitionist who hated booze and good fun in the late 19th century. In the hands of religion historian and feminist Fran Grace, this could not be farther from the truth. Yes, she loved to smash (who doesn't, y'all). Yes, she thought she was called by God to smash those bar-rooms and open up those whiskey kegs. But, her religious convictions also inspired the first generation of women who didn't realize that they had power in their own bodies to make change happen. This is incredible to ponder, especially when you realize for centuries, women were ignored in their own homes and abused. Fran Grace doesn't make her into a saint OR someone who was mentally ill; she does an incredible amount of research for first hand primary resources (and some seriously good newspaper footage) to describe this complex, inspiring, and tough woman from Kentucky. I need to go find a hatchet now. Highly recommended.
November 10, 2020
This biography does a beautiful job of painting Nation as a product of her times - an extraordinary one, to be sure, but very much a woman in reaction to the circumstances of the society around her. Other biographies mock her, treat her as an oddity, and ignore much of the context of her time, place, and relationship to religion, whereas Grace manages to give the reader a grounding in the America and the Mid-West in which Nation lived. Grace manages to humanize her without idealizing her, and I found it to be very readable and deeply researched.
April 30, 2008
This book started out pretty good and then it felt as if the author kept repeating the same stuff in every chapter. What should have been a fast read took forever! It was slow, uninteresting, and redundant.
November 10, 2020
Fran Grace's story of Carry A. Nation, the hatchet-wielding fiery temperance woman, turned me on to biography. I had been a longtime lover of memoir, but I had no idea until reading this account how biography writing is an art. Grace drew me in to the tale of this well-known temperance fighter, depicting a woman determined from her youth and early marriage to right the world in the ways she believe it had wronged her and so many others.
A cradle-to-grave biography, the book does not fail to provide one engaging scene after another that contributes to this heroic story of a woman who moved from Virginia through Missouri into Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. Here's one more reason why stories of past women's lives need to be excavated and shared.
A cradle-to-grave biography, the book does not fail to provide one engaging scene after another that contributes to this heroic story of a woman who moved from Virginia through Missouri into Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. Here's one more reason why stories of past women's lives need to be excavated and shared.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews