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Summary of

Sister Silfverbergs Sorrows

A Story about how a Sunday school Teacher became a Temperance Agitator and a Feminist

by Sidsel Eriksen:

[Sidsel Eriksen: Søster Silfverbergs sorger. Historien om hvordan en søndagsskolelærerinde blev afholdsagitator og feminist. Forlaget SPEKTRUM, København 1993, (394 sider ill.) ISBN 87-7763-088-2.]

Lene Silfverberg was born in 1838. She was the first woman agitator in the Danish temperance movement, which she joined at the start in 1880. She died in 1922, at a time when the heavy taxes imposed on distilled spirits in 1917 had made the temperance movement redundant. During the last forty years of her life, she both observed and participated in various key organizations in the Danish temperance movement. She belonged to the movement's pioneer generation, and it was among the teetotallers that Lene Silfverberg found her closest friends - and her worst enemies.
    When Silfverberg made contact with the movement in 1880, she was an unmarried teacher in the small provincial town of Vejle. There she founded the second Danish Good Templar Lodge among nonconformists - and heavy drinkers - in the town. At the same time she was engaged in building up the local Lutheran revivalist 'Home Mission' movement. No doubt she saw her temperance work as a natural part of the idea of Christian charity. In her view Christianity encouraged or even called upon women to take up social work.
    It was therefore a great disappointment for her, when the 'Home Mission' in 1885 not only rejected the temperance question as their cause, but also disowned those who took that cause seriously. They saw the temperance movement as a pseudo-religious sectarian movement and insisted that a 'temperance salvation' was a poor substitute for the true Christian salvation.
    Lene Silfverberg was thus forced to leave the 'Home Mission', and from that time concentrated on her temperance activities. Silfverberg remained faithful to her revivalist inspiration, however. As a temperance agitator she still used religious language, challenging the 'Home Mission' on their own ground, and becoming the main target of the constant Lutheran attacks on the temperance movement.
    After the break with the religious movements in Denmark, the temperance movement in general evolved into a purely moral and social movement striving for a new and better world, and with 'worldly' salvation as their goal.
As a new moral self-help movement the temperance people found their supporters among the lower middle class and the workers, especially in the centres of the big industrial towns. The biography is therefore a contribution to the understanding of the neglected cultural formation of the working class. The temperance movement was the second largest labour movement in Denmark, and its culture, though clearly anything but socialist, must therefore be seen as a part of working class culture.
    The temperance movement drew its ideological inspiration from America, stressing honesty and dignity and the need to protect the home and the family against the negative consequences of industrialization. Though the women in the temperance movement played an unobtrusive role, they were nevertheless of the greatest importance, not least because according to the temperance people it was the wife's responsibility to keep her husband sober. To work in the temperance movement was a female vocation. Thereby the temperance movement contributed to the spread of the concept of 'true womanhood' and 'home ideology'.
    The position of women in the Danish temperance movement was relatively weak in international comparison. As the only woman belonging to the inner circle Lene Silfverberg had a monopoly when it came to interpreting women's role in the movement. There is a remarkable coincidence between the temperance initiatives among women and the life of Lene Silfverberg.
    At the age of 42 Lene Silfverberg married a well-known teetotaller, moved to his home town, Århus, and gave up her work. Thus she realized the ideas about the duties of a good temperance woman, and used them in her expanding female agitation: as a married woman she was herself a successful propagandist for the idea of protecting the home and the family.
    When her husband Emil Silfverberg turned out to be a drinker, the shortcomings of her 'home ideology' became painfully obvious. In this situation she suddenly needed charity from her brothers and sisters in the lodge. Her biography shows how such a lodge could demonstrate solidarity in practice, helping its members to cope with problems, and how high the threshold of tolerance really was.
    Her biography is also a contribution to the understanding of the psychological mechanisms which made the temperance movement work. Lene Silfverberg experienced the actual functioning of a lodge, first as a supporter and organizer, and later as helpless and accused.
    Lene Silfverberg had to deviate from her principles about women in the temperance movement, when it appeared problematic in relation to her private life. After her divorce she made contact with feminist circles. This changed her idea about women's responsibility for their husbands drinking. She annoyed her male co-agitators greatly by encouraging women to ask for divorce from alcoholic husbands.
    Philanthropy was her new strategy for women. In 1907 Lene Silfverberg opened Københavnske Kvinders Kaffevogne, Copenhagen women's coffee stands, which operated on the streets of Copenhagen and outside larger factories, in order to keep the workers from drinking beer and liquor in pubs and bars.
    Through philanthropy and the confrontation with the real world Lene Silfverberg became politically conscious. She realized that only by being politically active could women hope to create better lives for themselves. Her own experience forced her to engage in the ongoing debate about female suffrage and the position of women in society.
    Contrary to the situation in America no alliance was forged between the Danish Women's Movement and the temperance movement. The 'feminists' did not see temperance as a female virtue; they even used alcohol as a symbol of emancipation and would not restrict their husbands either. The 'feminists' were also uninterested in the temperance women whom they looked upon as traditional and unintellectual. Especially the members of the leading Danish middle class organization for women, Dansk Kvindesamfund, were therefore relatively difficult to win for the cause.
    Even though the temperance women had an objective interest in women's suffrage because this would further the cause of prohibition, they generally remained loyal to their husbands and sceptical towards the 'feminist' ideas with Lene Silfverberg as the obvious exception. One possible reason for the relatively late introduction of women's suffrage in Denmark was the lack of support from the majority of temperance women.
    The women question is of key importance in the understanding of the Danish approach to alcohol. The political weakness of the temperance women and the lack of an alliance with the 'feminists' had as its consequence that the Danish temperance movement was unable to carry through prohibition in Denmark. Had the Danish temperance movement been more interested in the women question, and had the 'feminists' been interested in the temperance question, the heavy taxation in 1917 on distilled spirits would possibly not have been a final word in the Danish alcohol debate.