An illustration of the heroine of the temperance novel Sweet Cicely (1885), who begs a bartender to stop serving her husband.

Author Marietta Holley used humor to promote women’s issues, particularly suffrage and temperance. In Sweet Cicely or Josiah Allen as a Politician (1885), narrator Samantha Allen portrays arguments against women’s rights as ridiculous and drinking as the destroyer of the marriage of her niece, Cicely. Cicely and her mother-in-law find her husband Paul passed out drunk in a saloon. This illustration accompanies Cicely’s plea to the bartender to stop tempting Paul with liquor.