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Ryder, Morgan

This thesis approaches opinions on temperance and prohibition among early twentieth-century British Columbia’s working-class considering scholarship on temperance as an international progressive movement, rather than a moral reform movement. ‘Temperance activism’ has long been deployed by oppressed populations across the world in response to oppressors’ use of alcohol as a tool of domination, subjugation, and exploitation. Leaders of oppressed populations have harnessed temperance to promote organization in resistance movements against their oppressors, as well as to economically starve them. Harsh conditions for British Columbia’s working class led them to organize and engage in politics to resist capitalist oppression. This thesis seeks to determine whether the leaders among the working class who were devoted to improving working-class lives viewed temperance activism and prohibition of alcohol as a tool in overcoming capitalist oppression, despite the general unpopularity of prohibition among the working class. To answer this question, I look to working-class publications and working-class organizations’ official stances on the question of prohibition in an attempt to locate temperance activism.

Text

University of British Columbia. HIST 499

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0413202

Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan); History and Sociology, Department of (Okanagan)

Undergraduate

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