Page 49 - All About History - Issue 186-19

A century ago America banned booze, with women
leading the charge for and against Prohibition
hen America went dry in 1920, the
newspapers were filled with images
of the men in high office who had
ordered Prohibition into being and
the male enforcement officers who
were smashing booze into history. But behind
this masculine façade lay a reality few could deny.
Prohibition, one of the biggest social changes in the the United States were well aware that opposing
Western world in decades, was down to women.
Through social pressure, protests and relentless
campaigning, female prohibitionists had turned
the religious push for temperance that grew
steadily in 19th century American communities
into the dominant political issue of the early 20th
century. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t vote.
The populist politician William Jennings Bryan
acknowledged that ‘’women are largely responsible
for national Prohibition, which was secured
without equal suffrage’’.
With no official political voice for women,
the final push for a booze ban came from men.
It was Wayne Wheeler, the famously ambitious
leader of the Anti-Saloon League, who helped
draft the Act covering the legislation required to
implement the 18th Amendment, which banned
the ‘’manufacture, sale or transportation of
intoxicating liquors’’. That Act carried the name
Written by June Woolerton
of Andrew Volstead, the Republican politician weak and more prone to accident, injury or worse.
who sponsored it. Both men had grown up in The dangers posed to their children, of growing
a world where female prohibition campaigners up in poverty, were underlined in sermons and
had influenced education, scientific thought and pamphlets. Women were told their role was
media debate. They, like millions of other men of as the moral guardian of their home and their
voting age, had been brought up on the message community, and it was a message an increasing
that booze was bad. And male politicians across number took to heart.
In 1853, the first Women’s Temperance
prohibition and the women who wanted it could Convention was held in Ohio, an area that would
be fatal for their career ambitions. become a focal point in the push for prohibition.
This overarching influence was a long way from
the origins of the large-scale organised female
opposition to alcohol. As early as 1831, there had
been 24 women’s groups in America campaigning
for temperance, but often these early crusaders
wanted to control how much people drank rather
than stop them imbibing altogether. Those first
crusaders were giving voice to an increasing belief
in local communities, especially rural, that drink
was to blame for many of society’s problems.
Wives and mothers were targeted by ministers,
especially in fledgling Protestant churches, with
the message that alcohol was draining money and
morals from their family homes.
With no employment opportunities of their
own, women were warned that alcohol threatened
their very livelihoods as it made their husbands The first large formal march
in Washington DC for national
prohibition took place in 1913
and was dominated by women