Julia Colman

Julia Colman

Julia Colman (1828-1909) was the superintendent of literature for the WCTU from 1875 to 1890, and she also worked with the National Temperance Society. She contributed to temperance periodicals and wrote hundreds of tracts, pamphlets, and leaflets, as well as books. Colman was deeply invested in the effort to include scientific temperance instruction in public school curricula, and she delivered courses of lectures illustrated by chemical experiments. She wrote The Temperance Handbook for Speakers and Workers, which offered outlines for ten temperance lectures with instructions for scientific presentations.

Colman contributed pieces to juvenile reciters and wrote No King in America (1888), a temperance play in the form of a debate. No King in America was unusually negative in its depiction of Irish and German immigrants. During the 1870s and 1880s, temperance dramas written by rural Americans typically used relatively benign stereotypes of immigrants for comic relief, and some dramas depicted immigrants as reformers. Colman, however, argued that immigrants’ drinking habits threatened America’s values and democracy.