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Abstract
Banners were the primary textile of choice for Canadian members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the methodology proposed by Arjun Appadurai in The Social Life of Things, as well as on feminist scholarship by Rozsika Parker, Lisa Tickner, and Patricia Mainardi, among others, this article traces the various stages in the “social life” of a set of temperance banners that were rediscovered in 1984 at the bottom of a filing cabinet drawer. The primary objective is to illuminate not only the stages of the banners’ biography (Birth, Social Life, Hibernation, and Renaissance), but also the reasons why the banners were created (or born) in the first place, why they were perceived by members of the WCTU as important, even talismanic, objects, why they eventually lost their ostensible power, and why they could experience a Renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s. It is proposed that in order to understand this series of events, we must look closely at intersecting discourses related to gender, alcohol consumption, and textiles.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Janice Helland for her continued support. I am indebted to Kristina Huneault for bringing the exhibition catalog Gather Beneath the Banner to my attention and for her thoughts on an earlier version of this article. I also wish to thank Tina Bates of the Canadian Museum of History and Lorain Lounsberry of the Glenbow Museum for taking the time to discuss the banners with me. My thanks to Textile’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and suggestions.
Notes
1. In his book on trade union banners, John Gorman describes how following the defeat of the Labour Government in Britain in 1951 trade union banners “lay neglected in damp basements, beneath the stages of dusty Labour halls, crumpled beneath cardboard fileboxes of ancient minutes in cramped cupboards” (Gorman Citation1986, 9).
2. Tickner (Citation1987), especially 60–73, 254–261, and 262–264. See also The Women Artists Slide Library Presents A Second Viewing: An Exhibition of Posters, Banners, Photographs and Text from the Suffrage Movement; A Celebration of International Women’s Day 1986 (Citation1986); Callen (Citation1980, 220); Goodier-Kalaf (Citation1999, 23–25); and Parker (2011, 197–200)
3. The WCTU banners are not completely unknown in the literature on Canadian visual and material culture. For example, Jennifer Salahub (2011, 139) refers to them in a discussion of photographer Hannah Maynard.Citation
4. For further history of the WCTU in Canada, see Sharon Anne Cook (Citation1995); Daniel J. Malleck (Citation1997, 189–208); and Nancy Sheehan (Citation1981, 17–33).
5. The curators of Gather Beneath the Banner identify the flowers on this banner as violet asters (see Gather Beneath the Banner, 55). One of the anonymous reviewers of this article suggested that the flower looks more like golden rod.
6. Although there has been much written of the anonymity of female textile producers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Patricia Mainardi has shown that American women often signed their quilts: “the women who made quilts knew and valued what they were doing: frequently quilts were signed and dated by the maker, listed in her will with specific instructions as to who should inherit them, and treated with all the care that a fine piece of art deserves” (Mainardi Citation1982 [1973], 332).
7. In the catalog for the exhibition Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower, Elisabeth R. Fairman (2014) observes that the text “highlights the scientific pursuits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that resulted in the collecting and cataloguing of the natural world, and that informed the aesthetically oriented activities of the self-taught naturalist of the Victorian era, particularly those women who collected and drew specimens of butterflies, ferns, grasses, feathers, seaweed, and shells, and then assembled them into albums and commonplace books” (Citation14–15).
8. Conversation with Curator of Ontario History, Textiles and Costumes, Canadian Museum of History, Tina Bates, October 27, 2011.
9. Archives of Ontario, MU8453.7, Report of the 11th Convention of the World’s WCTU, Nov. 11–16, Philadelphia, PA, 1922, 35.
10. Archives of Ontario, MU8453.3, Report (illustrated) of the Seventh Convention of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass., Oct. 17–23, 1906, 21.
11. Archives of Ontario, MU 8406.9, “A National Historic Landmark …Willard House 1865–1965,” 2. Evanston, Illinois is approximately 20 miles north of Chicago.
12. “Extracts from the Report of Miss Clara M. Parris, the ‘Y,’ who gave four years to the World’s WCTU,” The Women’s Journal, vol XV, No. 11 (Jan. 1, 1901), 8.
13. Archives of Ontario, MU 8406.8, 9th Annual Report of the W.C.T.U. of Ontario, 9th Annual Convention, Oct.,12–14, 1886 (Ottawa: Free Press Printing and Publishing House, 1886), 22.
14. Archives of Ontario, MU 8406.8, 9th Annual Report of the WCTU of Ontario, 9th Annual Convention, Oct., 12–14, 1886 (Ottawa: Free Press Printing and Publishing House, 1886), 22.
15. Conversation with Senior Curator of Cultural History, Glenbow Museum, Lorain Lounsberry, February 10, 2012.
16. The Loyal Temperance Legion (LTL) was one of the after-school clubs affiliated with the WCTU (Cook Citation2013, 771).
17. Archives of Ontario, MU 8452.5, Report of the 4th biennial World’s WCTU Convention, Toronto, Oct. 23–26, 1897, 82.
18. Archives of Ontario, MU8408.1. Report of the 25th Convention of the Ontario WCTU, Toronto, Oct. 28–31, 1906, 46.
19. The dates inscribed on the 21 Canadian Museum of History banners are 1877 (commemorating the organization of the Ontario WCTU), 1883, 1884, 1885 (two banners), 1888 (the prize banner), 1890 (the Hamilton banner with a woman holding a sword), 1894 (two banners, one produced for the Westmount WCTU and one for the Western Union in Toronto), 1899, 1904, 1909, 1929, 1930, and 1932. Six of the Canadian Museum of History banners have no dates on them.
20. Archives of Ontario, F885, 10006727. Woman’s Christian Temperance Collection.
21. Tickner remarks that in 1908 and 1909 British suffrage banners were still “relative novelties” (Tickner Citation1988, 62).
22. See also Appendix 5, “Banners and Banner-Making” (Tickner Citation1987, 262–64).
23. Archives of Ontario, MU8408.8, “Report of the Provincial Corresponding Secretary, Flora Y. Miller,” Report of 32nd Annual Convention of the Ontario WCTU, Belleville, 1909, 34.
24. Archives of Ontario, MU8410.5, 53rd annual report of the Ontario WCTU, Belleville, Oct. 6–10, 1930, 67.
25. Archives of Ontario, MU8410.5, 53rd annual report of the Ontario WCTU, Belleville, Oct. 6–10, 1930, 75.
26. Archives of Ontario, MU8410.10, 58th annual report of the Ontario WCTU, Barrie, Oct. 1–4, 1935, 59, 63.
27. “World Members of WCTU Gather at Annual Banquet,” Globe, June 9, 1931, front page.
28. Sue Carter has alluded to the racism of the WCTU, noting the symbolic importance of “whiteness” in the Union’s iconography (Carter Citation2006, 333).
29. This is also the case for at least one American WCTU banner. An exhibition entitled Song of the Vine: A History of Wine that was created in 2008 by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library has been given a longer life through an online exhibition of objects including a WCTU banner, which appears to be made out of velvet, painted with an image of wheat and inscribed with the word “Cambria” along the top and “WCTU” along the bottom. The exhibition’s curators have dated the banner as c.1910. Cambria is a city in Pennsylvania, and the website informs us that, “The temperance movement was especially active in Pennsylvania, where this banner was made and used, as the Quaker founders of the state’s W.C.T.U. were sympathetic.” http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ewga/exhibition/temperance/; last accessed September 3, 2013.
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Julia Skelly
Julia Skelly is Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. She received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship in 2011, a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Publication Grant in 2013, and a Craft Research Fund CAA Travel Grant from The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design in 2014. She is the author of Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919 (Ashgate, 2014) and the editor of The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Ashgate, 2014). She has published articles in peer-reviewed academic journals including Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Visual Culture in Britain. Her current book-length project, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft, is under contract with Bloomsbury. [email protected]