A lively and sophisticated intellectual history... Manhood Lost furnishes new evidence for the centrality of the drink debate to nineteenth-century culture. Journal of American History 2004 Manhood Lost deserves a wide readership among historians of gender, temperance, and the nineteenth-century United States. -- Scott C. Martin Journal of the Early Republic Parsons makes a convincing argument for a much closer connection between discourses of women's rights and temperance in the nineteenth century. -- Thomas Winter Journal of Social History 2004 A fresh perspective on the ways in which nineteenth-century participants in America's temperance debate understood the roles of men and women and the relationships between individuals and their environment. -- Michelle M. Morgan History of Education Quarterly 2004 Its findings will be embraced enthusiastically by scholars affiliated with the emergent field of alcohol and addiction studies. -- John W. Crowley American Historical Review 2004 A provocative, fascinating, and elegant book. -- David M. Fahey Historian 2006 Parsons offers a fresh perspective on one of the more turgid chapters in American history: the temperance movement of the 19th century. She identifies a pervasive genre-the so-called 'drunkard narrative'-and uses it to uncover strains in how contemporaries thought about free will, individual responsibility and sexual inversion. -- Jessica Warner Addiction 2004 An intriguing, well written, and thought-provoking study that deserves a wide audience among American cultural historians. -- Laura R. Prieto American Nineteenth Century History 2004
