The temperance and prohibition movements in late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century Canada were sites where large numbers of mainly middle-class Canadians asserted a collective voice in the country's political affairs and, in the case of women, developed claims to complete citizenship. Debate in Canada relied heavily on ideas elaborated in the United States and England, and was roughly divided between those who supported regulation for the public good and those who held that regulation denied individual rights. Discussions on both sides were suffused with standard representations of gender based in, and turning on, unequal power relations between men and women. Through a close reading of one particular debate which appeared in The Canadian Monthly and National Review, a journal in which Canada's leading English-speaking intellectuals promulgated their views and promoted nationalist sentiment,¹ this paper investigates the significance of gender in temperance discourse in three ways: the articulation of rights and responsibilities, the conception of what constitutes justice, and the appeal to conventional imagery of women and men which both reflected and reinforced asymmetrical gender relations. This debate between two of Ontario's highly respected intellectuals - Agnes Machar (1837-1927), an established author, and J. A. Allen (1814-1900), a retired cleric - took place over a six-month period in 1877.

This particular debate was not necessarily significant to a resolution of the temperance question; neither Machar nor Allen was a key player in the campaigns. Rather, in this paper, I take an approach similar to that of Edward Said to get at the "dialectic between the individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his [or her] work is a contribution."² Machar and Allen exchanged ideas from within a circle of intellectuals who generally knew each other or each other's work; men and a few women who had read the same books and cited one another and their Greek and Roman forebears when asking and answering the same sorts of questions. Their views on the subject of temperance were quite typical of those expressed in American and British periodicals such as Scribner's Monthly (New York), and the Fortnightly Review and the Contemporary Review (England) to which literate Canadians with the leisure to read subscribed. Their debate is situated within a wide historical and intellectual context to show the ways it reflected prevailing views.

Biographical Background

Agnes Maule Machar was born into a family of high social standing in Kingston, Upper Canada, in 1837. Her father, Rev. John Machar, was minister of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church and one of the founders and principals of Queen's College. Her mother, Margaret Machar, was a model of energetic philanthropy which Agnes emulated in her own active commitment to voluntary public service.³ The young Agnes acquired much of her education in "Papa's study," the preferred method of educating daughters among the upper middle classes in this era.⁴ Moreover, Papa's was no ordinary study. The library of Rev. John Machar enhanced the early education of some of Canada's most prominent statesmen, including John A. MacDonald and Oliver Mowat.⁵ By reason of her sex, Machar did not have an opportunity for the university education that many young men of her class, including her younger brother John, enjoyed. Nonetheless, through disciplined and primarily self-directed study, she was accepted into and held her own among a wide intellectual circle. While she subscribed to the common view that marriage and motherhood were women's happiest destiny, she never married. And, despite Margaret Machar's initial reservations about her daughter's pursuit of a literary career, by the mid-1870s, the younger Machar had established herself as a woman of letters with several published novels, memorials, poems, and essays.⁶ She was a frequent contributor to The Canadian Monthly, often under the name "Fidelis," a pseudonym that witnessed her faith and hid her female identity. Her defence of Christianity against the charges of empiricists and sceptics, and her promotion of a revitalized Christianity, centred in "loving our neighbour as ourselves," identify her as an early proponent of the social gospel.⁷ Although women of the middle classes were increasingly energetic workers for temperance, and in 1874 they had created the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) to direct that work,⁸ Machar was, as far as can be determined, the only woman to tackle the temperance question in The Canadian Monthly.⁹

J. A. Allen (1814-1900) was born and spent his early years in Ireland. He attended university in Dublin and London although he did not get a degree. Apparently, he "showed no formal scholastic bent. . . but read omnivorously with a preference for science." Upon his arrival in the Canadas in 1842, he was ordained an Anglican priest, and shortly thereafter married Catherine Anne Charlotte Grant de Longueuil, daughter of a prominent Loyalist family. For some years, he took charge of Trinity Church on Wolfe Island, part of the property of his wife's family. He resigned his ministry in 1861 when he decided that he could no longer fully support the creeds of his church. After sojourning in the United States, Europe, and England for the benefit of his children's education, he returned to Kingston to take up residence in Alwington, an estate which had served as the seat of government during the brief period that Kingston was capital of the Canadas, and which now became "a mecca for many learned and cultured folk."¹⁰

Allen's search for truth had led him to credit scientific theory over theology, and like his son Grant Allen (who would soon be highly regarded as an evolutionist and a novelist), he disseminated and interpreted the theories of science to the layperson.¹¹ With a mutual interest in the relation of science to religion and assiduous self-education in both fields of study, Machar and Allen were peculiarly situated to offer informed perspectives on the scientific and religious suppositions that undergirded the issue of prohibition.¹² J. A. Allen enjoyed a position of privilege and prestige, as did Machar. In fact, they were related by marriage. Allen's daughter Catherine was the wife of Machar's brother John. However, despite their similar class status, Machar developed a very different notion from Allen of the responsibilities that attended privilege.

Rights: Of You, Me, and the Rest of Us

In 1877, the Temperance Act of 1864, commonly called the Dunkin Act, still regulated the sale of liquor in Ontario. This act recognized the principle of licence but also conferred power on municipalities to prohibit the sale of liquor and the issue of licences locally.¹³ The plan to have a local option vote in Kingston - a vote from which women were excluded - may have supplied the impetus for Machar to share her thoughts on the subject. Indeed, Machar's first article was a plea for "cordial support" from "all lovers of their country" for the Dunkin Act, and she further asserted that complete prohibition would be even more effective, and, as she put it, "cut the Gordian knot."¹⁴

Machar, as "Fidelis," opened the debate with an article published in April 1877, arguing that restriction of the sale of liquor was the central issue of the temperance problem. She stated that "man has the fundamental right to practise any industrial calling unmolested as long as this does not conflict with the rights of others." The sale of liquor did not fall within the realm of natural rights simply because it did interfere with the rights of others: "[the] rights of wife and children for protection of husband and father; rights of employers to faithful service; [and] rights of quiet and sober citizens to live in unmolested security to life and property." ¹⁵

However, rather than following this statement with a discussion of how the rights of others were violated - an approach which might have forestalled or at least re-directed Allen's opposition - Machar instead moved to a slightly different plane. She emphasized the destructive influence of the liquor trade on the common good of society rather than the actual or potential infringement of the rights of individuals. Thus, although she referred to a causal relationship between intemperance and "wives and children maltreated and murdered," she stressed the overall negative effect of intemperance on society with reference to its relation to insanity ("the production of idiots and imbeciles"), hereditary disease, pauperism, crime, and the truancy of children.¹⁶

Machar was not alone in her preoccupation with the damage done to the whole community by excessive drink. The general tone of discussions in temperance societies, W.C.T.U. meetings, and the Presbyterian General Assemblies indicates that intemperance was widely viewed as a matter, not only of individual sin, but of broad social concern.¹⁷ Moreover, the effort to determine the nature of the relation between intemperance and the assorted ills of society would exercise the mind and test the empirical skills of many a commentator throughout the latter part of the century. Select parliamentary committees and Royal Commissions collected evidence which, for instance, compared the total and per capita consumption of alcohol with convictions for offenses, committals to insane asylums, and expenditures to maintain the poor, in an attempt to test a causal connection.¹⁸ Machar relied on such statistics to make her case, citing from testimony given before a Select Parliamentary Committee as well as data gathered from other nations.¹⁹ Allen gave his opinion of the kind of statistics most generally published (and by implication the kind that she used) as "pitchforked at us in slovenly round numbers of millions, . . . statistics I know not how compiled, possibly in the interest of the theory to be established, by some zealot, who, having received a mental bent through religious or social influence, has, like the leaning tower of Pisa, never been able to grow straight again-for such statistics - . . . I have the smallest possible respect." Allen then pitchforked out not a few of his own.²⁰

In her bid for prohibitive measures against the liquor trade, by accentuating general damage to society over specific infringement of individual rights, Machar promoted the view that society then had the right to place limits on its citizens for the sake of the common weal, and to remove "gratuitous evil influences whose natural result would be to increase immorality just as malaria and miasmic germs increase disease and mortality."²¹ The reference to disease was not coincidental. Machar accepted and promoted the idea that intemperance was not only responsible for the spread of diseases like cholera,²² but that it was itself a disease, and thus restrictive measures to prevent its spread were justified in much the same way as the quarantine was used to prevent the spread of contagious diseases.²³ By drawing this kind of analogy, Machar underscored both the right and obligation of society to protect its corporate body. Allen was not swayed, asserting that restriction in the case of smallpox was warranted as contact with smallpox germs in the public thoroughfares would certainly be unavoidable and harmful, whereas contact with liquor was a choice and only harmful if taken in excess.²⁴

Moreover, in Machar's estimation, intemperance was more than a disease: it was a crime against society, and the liquor seller was "an accomplice before the fact." To prevent a crime against its corporate body, "society stands in for the intemperate man, and thus has right to restrict traffic."²⁵ In other words, since men did not always exercise self-control to prevent harm to society, society must exercise self-control to prevent harm to itself. In this way, society is personified as an individual with its own set of rights and tacit responsibilities, a troublesome concept for Allen.

In his first response to Machar, Allen argued that "it is the essence of liberty that every one may do as he pleases, so long as his doing so does not collide with the equal right of every other man to do as he pleases."²⁶ Allen refused to grant or even acknowledge Machar's assertion that the exercise of the liquor trade infringed upon the rights of others - specifically, as she reminded him thrice, the rights of women and children, employers, and quiet and sober citizens. However, Allen recapitulated her argument for the restriction of the liquor trade as if it had been framed from the perspective of benefit to society rather than harm to others. Within his own frames of reference, he would have had to acknowledge that harm to others was unacceptable, but he argued with considerable acumen that anticipated benefits of temperance, demonstrable or not, were not sufficient to warrant limitation of what he believed to be a fundamental and self-evident liberty - in other words, a man's right to eat and drink what he pleases.²⁷

Other contributors to The Canadian Monthly were of a similar mind. In fact, the language of indignation ignited by the threat of curtailment of that right resulted in some of the journal's most sexist and invective copy, of which the following is a mild example: "But a number of busybodies, well-meaning old women of both sexes, and a lot of intemperate total abstainers perverted men's minds and had Tom's glass dashed from his lips because Dick had a mind to let his travel that way too often."²⁸ And yet, legislation prohibiting the sale of liquor to Aboriginal peoples had been in place in the North-West since at least 1862.²⁹ While Machar applauded this legislation, protest over the curtailment of some peoples' liberty was conspicuously absent from anti-prohibitionist contributors to The Canadian Monthly. Allen's writing both evoked and reflected a fear of the tyranny of the majority, something (if little else) that he had in common with J. S. Mill.³⁰ In Allen's thought, this fear was linked to a deep distrust of what he referred to as the "doctrine of the paternality of Governments."³¹ "...[T]he iron heel of despotism, under the name of Paternality, could crush out the very soul of a people, and absorbing to itself the whole substance of liberty . . . I am therefore jealous of all encroachment on the liberty of the individual, and of all interferences with our natural rights. Such are simply usurpations, whether the usurper be a despot or a number of despots calling itself a majority, or the State."³²

Allen frequently reiterated the idea that society had no inherent rights and no power beyond that possessed and delegated to it by the individual: "Government is but the creature and representative of you, of me, and of the rest of us. . ."³³ Presumably by "individual," he meant a white male person of the propertied class since franchise at the provincial and national level at this time was limited to those propertied men whose race and/or ethnic origin did not disqualify them. Women in the Canadas had specifically been disqualified from voting in 1849.³⁴ Just as the individual had no right to interfere with the liberty of others, neither had government: "A majority have no right to act against right, though they may have the power." While he granted that it was the main duty of Government "to see that A does not injure B, and vice versa," the nature of this duty was likened to a constable of the peace who says: "'Gentlemen, you must not tread on one another's toes.'"³⁵ The treading on the toes of women and children was not admitted.

The subsequent history of the prohibition movement in Canada underscores the irony of Allen's fear of the tyrannical rule of the majority. While results of several provincial and dominion plebiscites indicated that the majority favoured prohibition, it took over fifty years of concerted agitation to bring it about, succeeding finally in 1916. Ten years later the ban was lifted. As historian Malcolme Graeme Decarie stated: "Prohibition ended its career as it had spent so much of it, wanted by a majority of the electorate but rejected by their political leaders."³⁶

While Machar argued that women had rights that were being usurped by the liquor trade, she defined these rights, in the main, as the right of wives and children to be provided for and protected by their husbands and fathers, a position closely aligned with that of the W.C.T.U.³⁷ Had Machar framed her argument around the violation of individual rights, she would have met Allen on the same ideological ground but it would have been difficult to sustain a convincing argument when women and children were customarily seen as having no legal rights. Husband and wife were one person under the English common law which operated in Canada except in Quebec, and, for all intents and purposes, that "'one person' was the husband."³⁸ It was 1884 before married women could control their own property and 1897 before they could sign contracts.³⁹ Indeed, one of the concerns expressed by anti-prohibitionists was that prohibitory legislation might lead "husband and wife to break the marriage vow by testifying against each other."⁴⁰ While Machar championed the rights of women and children regardless of the limitations placed on them under the law, her reliance on the seemingly surer ground of community good is not surprising.

Justice: Of Right and Belonging or Duty?

Allen's conception of justice was thoroughly grounded in the principle of individual right. Justice was thus quite distinct from expedience, a distinction that Allen brought home in this story:

Machar had never had a schoolmaster but was well schooled in another conception of justice. For her, justice was grounded in the principle of the highest good of the whole community and articulated in the language of Christian duty: "The highest good of the whole community is and must be, the only true basis of social legislation, and all the so-called 'rights' that conflict with this, are simply not rights at all." She reminded her readers that the law provided for a man's liberty, and even his life to be forfeited ("as every death sentence testifies") if he acted in conflict with the good of the community.⁴² For Machar, duty was the obverse of rights; in fact nowhere in her writing on this or any other social issue does she invoke the language of rights without simultaneously considering the obligations co-ordinate with those rights.⁴³ Drinking intoxicants was not a matter of conscience between man and God, for man had no right to disable himself from performing his duty.⁴⁴ Foremost among the duties that Machar would ascribe to men (and one on which Allen was silent) was adequate provision for their wives and children. She was prepared to restrict individual liberty to enable "our brother" to perform this duty, and this restriction was cast in the language of duty: "if we . . . can do anything to shield the poor victims of this terrible temptation from their destroyer - anything to protect the poor women and children who are the deepest and most helpless sufferers - it is our bounden duty, as Christians to do it."⁴⁵

For Allen, doing one's duty fell far short of being one's brother's keeper and the kind of willing sacrifice of liberty that such implied. It was enough to strike a pose worthy of emulation and to encourage the slow process of evolutionary reform through an occasional friendly chat with the less fortunate: "Hence it becomes the duty of every one of us [the more advanced on the road of progress]. . . to try, by the exhibition of a good example, by gentle appeals to the conscience and emotional nature, by arguments addressed to reason, by kindly words of warning and Christian treatment, to elevate those with whom we are brought in contact, and to seek to strengthen them in habits of self-control, and all this in a kindly, natural and genial way."⁴⁶

Allen likened the Prohibitionists' "rough-and-ready" method to those who thought the best way to preserve religion was to "destroy the misbeliever and thus silence his heretic tongue."⁴⁷ The linking of Prohibition with religious persecution was a common enough analogy. For example, F. Blake Compton, a contributor to Rose-Belford's Canadian Monthly (the successor of The Canadian Monthly), facetiously argued that if one accepted Prohibition on the grounds that it was beneficial, than one could make an even better case for religious persecution by the dominant sects since eternal welfare rather than merely temporal welfare was at stake.⁴⁸

Allen read both the absence of prohibitory law against fermented drinks in the Bible and the examples of Jesus drinking wine as sufficient justification for a continued absence of prohibitory law:

Christ was not the only granite cliff that baffled the waves. Allen's views were strongly influenced by the popularizer of social Darwinist theory, Herbert Spencer. Legislation prohibiting the sale of liquor was suspect, according to Allen, because it "tends to defeat, by artificial obstruction, the great winnowing processes of nature to sift out the weak."⁵⁰ With lengthy references to Spencer, Allen contended that prohibitory legislation would only aid the "'unworthy to multiply.'"⁵¹ This judgement, Machar responded, if applied at all, would have to be applied to "all philanthropic movements" including hospitals, asylums, and hygienic reforms. Machar argued that the "survival of the fittest" doctrine was opposed to the example and bidding of Christ, whose ministry she cited as one of uplifting the poor and the weak:

Men had to be freed from the tyranny of drink before they could be raised up by moral means, and the prohibition of liquor was the most effective way of achieving this goal. For Allen, the remedy was "[n]one but 'the relentless forces of Nature,' eliminating the weak, and the general presence of truer and higher principles, and a different and higher teaching, and-time."⁵³ The problem of men's over-drinking would apparently diminish over time as their brains became more specialized and thus sensitized to the "myriad slight ictuses of mental, moral, and aesthetic beauty," thereby reducing the need for coarser stimulants.⁵⁴

Assumptions about proper gender relations were embedded in Spencerian sociology. Terry R. Kandal has pointed out that Spencer, in his 1851 Social Statics, put forward a vision of sexual equality in marriage and argued for women's rights to political power. By 1865, for reasons that remain "a puzzle," Spencer's view of female nature had changed dramatically.⁵⁵ He had come to believe that basic physical and psychic differences existed between men and women and were the result of adaptations to their different reproductive functions. The differences placed women lower than men on the evolutionary scale. Women's intellectual and emotional faculties, especially their sense of justice, were seen as peculiarly deficient, a point emphasized by Allen in his repeated reference to the "grand old Pagan schoolmaster" whose lesson in justice privileged individual right and belonging over what was appropriate to the social context.⁵⁶ If it was the most powerful and ruthless men who were the "fittest" and who thus survived, then it followed that the women who survived and reproduced were those who acquiesced to male power. According to the premises of evolutionary functionalism, all that was granted as "natural" to women - their submission to authority, their maternal instinct to care for the helpless, and their undeveloped sense of justice - made them unfit for public life or political power because, had they such power, they might interfere with the evolutionary process by helping the weak to survive and reproduce. Compassion, constructed as a peculiarly female trait, was considered a hindrance to evolution.

Images of Womanly Women and Manly Men

At the same time as Allen pointed to the dangers of women's "natural" altruism, he also invoked the dangers of women's "natural" frivolity. In a clearly sardonic but nevertheless stinging argument, he equated state intervention to prohibit the liquor trade with the enactment of sumptuary laws to control women's consumption, since "women's love of dress and show and trinkets, has, physicians tell us, taxed their husbands' brains to their utmost tension and beyond it, rendered their lives a miserable struggle and cut them short in mid-career, plunging them into drinking and gambling, brain-softening and insanity. . ."⁵⁷ An analogy between man's passion for drink and woman's passion for dress appears frequently in contemporary commentary on temperance.⁵⁸ This style of reasoning was picked up in a "Round The Table" discussion by an unknown participant who took Fidelis to task for her comparison of the licensing of liquor sellers to "legalizing the office of tempter."⁵⁹ The writer made the point that "tacit license" of the dry goods salesman and the jeweller to flaunt their wares, and thus tempt women to spend more than their husbands or fathers could afford ". . . is at the root of an amount of social and domestic misery immeasurably greater than that caused by drunkenness."⁶⁰ Ironically, the scorn heaped on women for their alleged preoccupation with fashion and dress was occurring at the same time that women seeking the privileges of higher education were being judged critically for their mannish looks and dowdy clothes.⁶¹

In her 1877 temperance essays, Machar viewed women mainly as the victims of intemperance. However, while it is doubtful that she would have agreed with Allen that it was women's love of excitement that promoted a decay of nerves and prompted men to seek replenishment in alcohol,⁶² she also subscribed to commonplace notions that women were to blame for male intemperance.⁶³ She urged women to make their homes attractive to men so as not to drive them to seek solace in the pubs. In a later essay, she recommended the implementation of cooking classes for "working men's wives" to remedy the craving for drink induced in men by "unpalatable meals," an approach taken both by the W.C.T.U. and, much later, the National Council of Women of Canada.⁶⁴

The debate between Machar and Allen also played on identifiable nineteenth-century conceptions of manhood. The man that appears between the lines in Allen's pages is remarkably free from any family ties or obligations. Allen was profoundly silent on the question of a husband's and father's duties or responsibilities. In his view, self-control was the quintessential expression of manhood and the solution to intemperance. Instead of "abandoning their children to others to be educated," parents were advised to teach young men "that uncontrol, instead of being masterful and manly and the sign of a high spirit, is, in very deed, the proof of a very feeble and degenerate and unmanly nature."⁶⁵ In her study of the mid-nineteenth-century temperance movement, Jan Noël has further substantiated the idea that self-control in a man was associated with control in the economic, political, and cultural realms, so that an appealing argument for young men to control their drinking habits was the promise of worldly success for the temperate.⁶⁶

Self-control was inextricably linked to notions of individual right and autonomy. Allen's parting words for young men were to consider "that one of the greatest duties in life is this, 'to guard the individual of whatever grade against trespasses upon his individuality'." They were to let "pure principles, not probable consequences" be their guide.⁶⁷ In other words, they were not to be swayed from an absolute adherence to the principle of individual right, and certainly not by anything as capricious as compassion.

Machar countered Allen's conception of the individual man by invoking a patriotic and Christian standard of manliness, asking what man worthy of the name could not give up his ale for the sake of his neighbour. If men could be prevailed upon to lay down their lives for the good of their country, then surely they could lay aside their daily dram for the same good: "How then, by any manly man, the privation of a mere luxury, unnecessary in ordinary health, and so often injurious even in what is called moderation, could be for a moment placed in comparison with the rescue of thousands from overpowering temptation ending in utter ruin, it is indeed difficult to understand!"⁶⁸

Standard representations of gender were not confined to abstract women and men but also appeared in the authors' assessments of each other. Throughout his two essays written in response to Fidelis, Allen damned her work with faint praise, calling it "impassioned" and "eloquent" but fundamentally lacking in "logic, reason, and sense."⁶⁹ Readers heard of how "the emotional in our nature becomes a disturbing element in the intellectual judgements we come to" in reference to Fidelis' position on prohibition, but of the "clear and manly and powerful reasoning" and "masculine sense" of a contemporary male anti-prohibitionist.⁷⁰ Some Canadian Monthly readers may not have been aware that Fidelis was a woman, but Allen would have known. These comments seem deliberately construed to slight her. For her part, Machar was very careful to separate "Mr. Allen" from the "sensual, selfish, mercenary, and reckless" opponents of prohibitory law, to accord him the "utmost respect," and to evoke images of the gentleman and fair play in her description of him as "so able, courteous, and generous an opponent," and "so fair an antagonist."⁷¹ Only in her final essay did her graciousness sharpen to mild rebuke when she chastised him for misrepresenting her meaning on several occasions and she found fault with the structure of his arguments ("...Mr Allen will not surely maintain that 'premises' are identical with 'corollaries'"⁷²).

State Intervention: What's Gender Got To Do With It?

Allen and Machar were grappling with an issue that still raises hackles over a century later; that is, what is the authority and power of the state to restrict individual freedom for the public good? The role of government in regulating the activities of the governed was tested and contested in a number of different areas during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and what was condoned as rightful government protection in one area may have been rejected as unnecessary interference in another.⁷³ For Allen, almost any instance of state restriction, especially that which might impinge on him - a white, propertied adult male - was thought to open an irreversible and ever-widening breach. He was particularly incensed with having to pay for the privilege of having a wrong done to him. Here he was referring to the cost to taxpayers of implementing and enforcing prohibition, but he went so far as to regret the cost to taxpayers of employing government inspectors in bakeries to assure that loaves of bread were sold at the proper weight, saying that such measures encouraged folly in consumers as they came to rely on the judgement of the state rather than being obliged to develop their own.⁷⁴ By contrast, a primary focus of women's reform organizations was increased state intervention to protect consumers. As Sharon Cook has illustrated for Ontario, this was part of the W.C.T.U.'s broad scope of reform, even more so for the later Women's Institutes and the National Council of Women and its local affiliates.⁷⁵

For Machar, state restriction of the liquor trade was held to be the lesser of two evils. She was aware of the class prejudice inherent in prohibitory legislation, admitting that the Canadian Dunkin Act was more restrictive toward the poorer classes, a fact highlighted by Allen in his description of the careless ease with which a gentleman in comfortable surroundings, "amid his grapes and walnuts, sipping his wine," could vote away his poor neighbour's glass of beer.⁷⁶ While Allen would allow the "self-controlled" poor the safety valve of an occasional drink, Machar resorted to the age-old justification that "it is for their own good that they are restricted."⁷⁷

Despite the differing positions that Machar and Allen took with respect to the role of the state, their writing consolidated their own identities as separate from and more powerful than those they studied. In fact, their public debate exemplified the shift highlighted by Andrew Holman's study of Victorian temperance reform: "By the 1870s. . . only the social and political power of the middle class could solve what came to be seen as all of society's problem."⁷⁸ Both Allen and Machar took for granted a hierarchical ordering of society. Allen dressed old-guard ideas of traditional class relations in fashionable Spencerian garb; Machar leaned more toward human perfectibility and progress in what was predominantly a spirit of noblesse oblige. While a sense of moral guardianship was also present in Allen's discourse, the ideas of evolutionary functionalism predominated.

To state their views on gender relations somewhat simplistically, Allen maintained that men must be free to do what they pleased and he implied that women and children must simply bear the consequences of that freedom; Machar contended that men must put aside their drink to protect women and children and that women and children must make homes that men would want to protect. Both Machar and Allen appealed to widely-accepted constructions of gender and assumed relations of unequal power between men and women.

Some scholars have interpreted the temperance and prohibition movements as efforts, inasmuch as intemperance was seen overwhelmingly as a male predilection, to curb male violence against women, and to regulate male sexuality.⁷⁹ Kathryn Harvey argues that the assumed natural sexual divisions in family relationships were being challenged by women having to abandon their maternal role to work outside the home in the face of the drunken husband's failure to provide.⁸⁰ The prohibition campaign is thus seen, in part, as an effort to shore up the doctrine of separate spheres for the sexes and to remove any cross-over of the boundary between the two. In particular, female wage-earning had to be fixed by re-asserting the primacy of the male breadwinner. Machar's insistence on the rights of women and children to be provided for by their husbands and the duty of husbands to provide lend credence to Harvey's interpretation; nevertheless, she was aware that married women at the time had no ready access to jobs and no legal right to their own wages. Indeed, women had few practical alternatives to the patriarchal family.

After the 1877 temperance debate, Allen no longer published in The Canadian Monthly or its successor. By contrast, while Machar's views on the prohibition question never again achieved national prominence, she continued to investigate a wide range of social concerns and advocated a broad platform of social reform throughout the 1880s and 1890s in articles on poverty, compulsory schooling, and female factory labour.⁸¹ In these articles, she continued to refine and promote a vision of a community based on inter-relationship and mutual obligations rather than individual autonomy.

The principles tested and contested in this nineteenth-century debate on the prohibition of the liquor trade - the rights and responsibilities of the individual and the collective society -- reflected the period's prevailing views and continued to be relevant throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The role of the state in providing a social safety net is currently being argued anew in Canada and elsewhere and in ways that deploy normative concepts of gender. Moreover, the consequences of governments' withdrawal from publicly-funded services are experienced differently for men and women.⁸² Allen's individualism and Machar's collectivism turned on received notions of masculinity and femininity that both revealed and reinforced asymmetrical power relations between men and women. While men may (and do) argue for collective responsibility and community rights and women may (and do) argue for individual rights and personal freedom (as Machar herself did in other contexts), the arguments in favour of one or the other have been and continue to be articulated in reference to gender ideologies. Allen's and Machar's voices echo and re-echo down the decades in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan, for example, in the debates and court cases based on Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and in the discourses that frame our daily news.⁸³