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I think it was a money-making and control scheme from the start: "can't trust the peons with anything.. let's put them under our control !" Do know that both the temperance movement and early feminism came from the top down: upper class and middle class people lecturing the worker and that the early social democrats in both countries also came from the "educated middle class" chattering classes. What they were/are are essentially sumptuary laws enforced on the lower classes whose social ills than no longer need to be looked into. It's a cheap bandage for a big problem.
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