represents a small yet significant feminine victory in a protracted, elemen-
tal confrontation.
Ted Ownby, historian of the cultural forces within modernization, has
imaginatively construed much from women’s and preachers’ struggles
against masculine ‘‘recreation,’’ which (as we have seen) included hunting
and a range of boisterous, violent entertainments that usually included ani-
mals. These struggles provide much of the context for the emergence of
women’s organizations and presuffrage political engagement, and for the
temperance and prohibition movements. Prohibition and the Nineteenth
Amendment, the national successes of women and their allies, may be, ar-
guably, no more important than less well-known reforms, including child
protection, hunting regulations, decorous county and state fairs, the hu-
mane treatment of animals, and other issues related to sanguinary male
behavior.^15
Evangelical complaints had substance. Tales of drunken gangs of males
hunting all night—not infrequently binge-killing animals—surely offended
many ears; but such amusements were male-only and took place outside
civilization, as it were. Often as not, however, all-night shooting carousals
were concluded by noisy returns—horns blowing, shots fired, and voices
yelling. And since Saturdays were typically the beginning of such binges,
disturbances of Sunday morning church services were not unknown. The
movieSergeant Yorkopens with a nighttime country church service that is
aborted by the shouting and pistol-firing of three drunken men on rear-
ing horses outside—one of them Alvin York. Outside, the congregants (in-
cluding Alvin’s pious mother) notice that the initialsAYare shot, in per-
fect form, into a tree trunk. Mrs. York and other church members cannot
resist expressing admiration for the signature. Other disrupters of church
services were more disturbing and never tolerated. They created not only
alarming noise but reckless, intentional intrusions; rocks were thrown at
walls and windows, and horses actually barged into sanctuaries. When
drunken hunters finally came home, they were merely drunks. Infamously
abusive, sometimes physically, to their families, drunken heads of house-
hold were infamously impecunious, too, wasting wages on ‘‘bust-head’’ and
gambling away property. Christmas, whatever day of the week it fell on,
seems to have been drinkers’ all-favorite holiday for bingeing.
In towns, Saturdays were occasions for men to gather—and drink—at
stores, in the street, and before stables. Foul language, open gambling, and
fighting were commonplace. Women and girls, wanting Saturday town di-
versions themselves, were disgusted and dismayed—often led away or for-