Toots and Other Stories, Anna Adams Gordon
I picked this book up either at a thrift store or an estate sale. I love antique children's books and readers. I find them fun and charming to read, but this one just didn't strike my fancy. This book was published in 1906, and is full of little vignettes and poems heralding the virtues of temperance. Often mentioned, in almost every story are Frances E. Willard and different Temperance Societies. Each story has something to do with abstaining from alcohol or shows how alcohol destroys people, families, and finances, and shows children vowing never to drink alcohol.
It's a book with noble ideas, I just feel it wasn't written in a way that was interesting. The pictures are mostly photos and have a charm about them. If nothing else, it made me do a deep dive on Frances E. Willard. Here is what I discovered:
According to the Encyclopedia Brittannica, Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was born September 28, 1839 and died February 18, 1898 at the age of 59. She was a native of New York, and was an educator, reformer, and founder of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She spent much of her life lobbying, and was a leader of the national Prohibition Party, and spoke often on temperance, prohibition, and women's suffrage. This book mentions her often, in a way that seems to glorify her as a saint, which perhaps that is how the writer saw her. However, it doesn't really go into her history, just kind of name drops in each story, assuming the reader already knows who she is.
Perhaps it was enjoyable in its time. I just feel more could have been done to flesh it out.
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