The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1876-11-16
VOL. XII---NO. l8
Women and Wine.

Of the worst foes that woman.ha ever
had to encounter wine stands at the head.
The appetite for strong drink in man has
spoiled the lives of more women-ruined
more hopes for them, scattered more for
tunes for them, brought them more sor-
row, shame and hardships-than any
other evillthat lives. The country num-
bers tens of thousands, nay, hundreds of
thousands of women who are widows to-
day and sit in hopeless weeds because
their husbands have been slain by strong
drink. There are hundreds of thousands
of homes scattered all over the land in
which women live lives of torture, going
through all the changes of suffering that
lie between the extremes of fear and des-
pair, because those whom they love like
wine better than they do the women they
have sworn to love. There are women
by thousands who dread to hear at the
door the step that once thrilled them with
pleasure, for that step has learned to reel
under the influence of seductive poison.
There are women groaning with pain,
while we write these words, from bruises
and brutalities inflicted by husbands
made mad by strong drink. There can
be no exaggeration of any statement
made in regard to this matter, because
no human Imagination can create any
thing worse than the truth, and no pen
is capable of portraying the truth. The
sorrows and the horrors of wife with a
drunken husband, of Il mother with q
drunken son, are as near the realization
of hell as can be reached in this world at
least. The shame, the Indignation, the
sorrow, the sense of disgrace for herself
and her children, the poverty land not
unfrequently the beggary,) the fear and
the violence, the lingering, life long
struggle and despair of countless women
with drunken husbands are enough to
make all women curse wine, and engage
unitedly to oppose it everywhere as the
worst enemy of their sex. =
Women, there are some things you can
do, and this is one: You may make
drinking unpopular and disgraceful
among the young. You can utterly dis
countenance all drinking in your own
house, and you can hold in suspicion
every young man who touches. the cup.
You know that no young man who drinks
can safely be trusted with the happiness
of any woman, and he is as unfit as a
man can-be for a woman's society. Have
it understood that every young man who
drinks is socially prescribed: Bring up
your children to regard drinking as not
only dangerous but disgraceful. Place
temptations in no mans way. If men
will make beasts. of themselves, let them
do it in other society than yours. If
your mercenary husbands treat their
customers from private stores kept in
their counting-rooms shame them into
decency by your regard for the honor OF
your home. Recognize the living, terri,
BILE fact that wine has always been, and
is to-day, the curse of your sex; that it
dries up your prosperity that it endan-
gers your safety; that it can only bring
you evil. If social customs compel you
to present wine at your feasts, rebel
against it, and make social custom in
the interest of virtue and purity. The
matter is very much in your hands. The
women of the country, in what is called
polite society, can do more to make the
nation temperate than all the Legislators
and tumultuous reformcrs that are strug-
Cling and blundering in their efforts to
| this end.