The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The success of reformers, particularly female reformers, of making home protection the rationale for political action against Indians, Mormons, pornographers, saloonkeepers, and others, spoke to the political power of the home, but the greater danger remained subversion from within. This betrayal of the home did not come from spectacular infidelities, as was the subject of the Beecher-Tilton trial, but instead from subtler developments. As part of the long struggle of women to take control of their own bodies and childbearing, female fertility steadily declined, leading to charges by the end of the century that Protestant white women were failing in their duty to the home by restricting the number of children they bore. These charges usually came from middle- and upper-class men. But men from these same classes were simultaneously engaged in a quiet withdrawal from the home. This was not the withdrawal of workingmen seeking camaraderie and relief in a saloon, but instead the retreat into fraternal lodges, as devoted to temperance as the WCTU, that became a defining feature of the period.