The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation

About the book

Carry A. Nation recounts childhood, marriage, religious conviction, and the experiences that led her into an uncompromising campaign against alcohol. Personal suffering becomes part of a public argument about homes, women, law, and the responsibility of political institutions. Her attacks on saloons are presented as acts of moral duty, and the narrative follows the confrontations, arrests, speeches, and publicity surrounding that position. The book combines autobiography with exhortation, quotations, and direct appeals to readers, so that recording a life also means recruiting support for a cause. Nation's forceful voice makes clear how she understood her mission, while her judgments expose the assumptions and conflicts within the reform culture through which she acted.

• Temperance activism
• Religious conviction
• Women and public protest

Why read it

Read it for a reformer's uncompromising account of how private experience became a controversial public mission.

English text of the revised 1905 edition