Women and prohibition
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A presentation on women and prohibition. It is a lecture based presentation with graphic elements to present the information in a clear context to engage auditory and visual learners. It discusses the Women's Temperance movement, suffrage, Prohibition, and the repeal.
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Women and prohibition
- 1. The New Woman of the 1920s THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT AND PROHIBITION 1820 - 1933
- 2. Women vs. Demon Rum Women’s Activism Women’s Suffrage and Prohibition Era Legacy of Women in Politics and Prohibition
- 3. Population boom Universal suffrage for adult white men Increase in drinking by individuals Reasons for drinking were numerous, leading to more frequent binge drinking. Early to Mid-1800s
- 5. Women Find a Cause Temperance became a women’s activism movement. Visions of progress for families as well as fears of violence and poverty at the hands of drunken husbands inspired many women to undertake temperance activism.
- 6. Women’s Unions and Groups
- 7. Major Players Frances Willard Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton Carry Nation
- 8. Anti-Saloon League and pressure politics Minorities and xenophobia The Great War Passing Prohibition: Ratified January 1919, enforced January 1920
- 9. Women’s demand for a vote was intertwined with their demand for social justice. They had become masters of pressure politics and networking through work on prohibition. The 19th Amendment passed House & Senate in May of 1919 and was ratified in 1920.
- 10. Women’s Fight to Maintain Prohibition Began to hold offices, including U.S. House of Representatives Fight for Prohibition helped gain suffrage Election of Herbert Hoover
- 11. Women’s Political Activism Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) Friction among women’s organizations New generation of women
- 13. Repeal of Prohibition 21st amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933 repealing the 18th amendment
- 14. Enduring Legacy Women’s rights and right to have fun Drinking level remained constant until 1960s Rolls into the World War II era of women at work
- 15. For more information… Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940 Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933
Notas do Editor
- Today we’re going to talk about this new type of woman that emerged in the 1920s. This new woman was largely brought about by the fight for prohibition which we discussed a bit about just a few weeks ago. Sidenote that this is just a broad overview in a short 15 minute time frame.
- We’re going to start with a quick overview of women’s activism up to prohibition and then discuss the link between women’s suffrage and prohibition in the 1920s and how that changed both how women were viewed in politics and how they changed as individuals. Then we’re going to end with the legacy we’ve been left with of women in politics from the prohibition era.
- In just forty years, the United States population tripled, from 3,929,000 in 1790 to 12,901,000 in 1830. – 4By the 1820s the traditional state-imposed property qualifications that restricted the electorate at the end of the eighteenth century had given way to universal suffrage for adult white men. Between 1820 and 1830 the number of qualified voters in the United States doubled. Deferential representative politics had been replaced by mass democracy, that is if you define democracy by ruling of all white men. Still excluded in this process are the free African-Americans, the slaves, and the white women. -5Aided by the growth of the market economy and its attendant dislocations, Americans between 1800 and 1830 drank more alcohol, on an individual basis, than at any other time in the history of the nation, including today. During that span Americans above the age of fourteen on average consumed each year between 6.6 and 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol (current American consumption is about 2.8 gallons annually). According to the historian W.J. Rorabaugh, the chief authority on American drinking patterns in the nineteenth century, the 1820s witnessed a shift to more frequent binge drinking, both solitary and with companions. – 7, 10Also, most water available for drinking was muddy, brackish, metallic-tasting, or had to be obtained by means of wells, long hauls, or frequent rain. Alcohol was a much more convenient and easily obtained beverage. – 9Women drank in the home; men drank more frequently and more copiously at home, in the fields or the shop, and at taverns and during public events such as elections; solicitous parents shared beer with children at meals and encouraged boys to develop a taste for distilled spirits. – 7Americans drank because they believed that, when taken in moderate doses, alcohol was not only safe but actually beneficial to their health. It was also commonly believed that alcohol possessed rejuvenative powers that helped workers carry out heavy or toilsome labor. I know growing up, granted this wasn’t in the 1920s, but the men in my family had me convinced that putting things together and working outside required beer. They even measured the jobs in beer, moving the lawn was usually a 4 beer job. – 9
- This is one of my favorite images from this time period discussing alcohol. Almost feels like it should be a poster on the “this is why you shouldn’t drink” wall of the Alcoholics Anonymous main office. You see the different steps of men as they progress through to becoming alcoholics, violent husbands, who will eventually leave their wives and children (who are portrayed beneath the bridge).
- The emergence of temperance reform as a mass movement in the 1820s exuded optimism as much as it reflected anxiety over the fate of individuals and the nation. The activists looked beyond the ruined lives of individual drunkards to insist that intemperance threatened the social order itself. – 14Visions of progress for families as well as fears of violence and poverty at the hands of drunken husbands inspired many women to undertake temperance activism. – 17 The participation of women was another new feature of the temperance movement linked to the revivals. – 19 Women found something to be passionate about, something that inspired them enough to become extremely active in their local communities and voice their opinions broadly. Second great awakening and beginning of the social gospel movement as we discussed a few weeks ago.As the temperance movement grew, it spread outside of the evangelicals and religious groups. Diverse groups of Americans began to seek the self-discipline, respect, and stable home lives promised by temperance on their own terms rather than those prescribed by religious and social elites. The appearance of working-class and fraternal temperance societies, best represented by the Washingtonian movement, challenged the religious and middle-class dominance of temperance reform. – 24Total abstention from alcoholism – teetotalism- soon became the standard goal of temperance reform, a position that put temperance organizations in much sharper opposition to traditional attitudes toward drink. Temperance no longer involved careful use of lighter alcoholic beverages; it required conversion to the use of cold water. – 24 (mid 1830s to early 1840s)Image: almost Joan of Arc style cartoon, “Woman’s Holy War” Notice one alcohol that you don’t see yet here? Beer…
- In 1873, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union formed in Ohio. This became one of the preeminant forces in the Temperance movement revival. The second president of the WCTU, Frances Willard, demonstrated a sharp distinction from Annie Wittenmyer (the first president),in how she felt the WCTU should be involved in the temperance movement. As president between 1879 and 1898, Willard had a much broader interpretation of the social problems at hand. She believed in "a living wage; in an eight-hour day; in courts of conciliation and arbitration; in justice as opposed to greed in gain; in Peace on Earth and Good-Will to Men."[7] This division illustrated two of the ideologies present in the organization at the time, conservatism and progressivism. As a result, the Eastern Wing of the WCTU supported Wittenmyer and the Western Wing had a tendency to support the more progressive Willard view.Membership within the WCTU grew greatly every decade until the 1940s.[8] By the 1920s, it was in more than forty countries and had more than 766,000 members paying dues at its peak in 1927.
- So that leads us to the major players behind the women’s movements. We just discussed Frances Willard. Everyone knows Susan B. Anthony and her fight for women’s rights and suffrage. At the very least you’ve seen her face on the Susan B. Anthony dollar coins issued by the post office. Notice how men’s faces are on the paper money that can be spent anywhere, but the women’s faces are on the dollar coins that no one really accepts unless you talk them into it?Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement. We’ll talk more about her in a minute.I included Carry Nation in here just because she had such an impact on the state of Kansas and the entire temperance movement. And she’s one of my favorite people because of her story. She had a revelation from God that she needed to destroy the alcohol in her region. Responding to the revelation, Nation gathered several rocks – "smashers", she called them – and proceeded to Dobson's Saloon on June 7. Announcing "Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard's fate," she began to destroy the saloon's stock with her cache of rocks. After she similarly destroyed two other saloons in Kiowa, a tornado hit eastern Kansas, which she took as divine approval of her actions. Nation continued her destructive ways in Kansas, her fame spreading through her growing arrest record. After she led a raid in Wichita her husband joked that she should use a hatchet next time for maximum damage. Nation replied, "That is the most sensible thing you have said since I married you.“Nation's anti-alcohol activities became widely known, with the slogan "All Nations Welcome But Carrie" becoming a bar-room staple.
- Led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the dry forces had triumphed by linking Prohibition to a variety of Progressive era social causes. Proponents of Prohibition included many women reformers who were concerned about alcohol's link to wife beating and child abuse and industrialists, such as Henry Ford, who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor productivity. Advocates of Prohibition argued that outlawing drinking would eliminate corruption, end machine politics, and help Americanize immigrants. Even before the 18th Amendment was ratified, about 65 percent of the country had already banned alcohol. In 1916, seven states adopted anti-liquor laws, bringing the number of states to 19 that prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. America's entry into World War I made Prohibition seem patriotic since many breweries were owned by German Americans. Wayne Wheeler, lobbyist for the Anti-Saloon League and pressure politics guru, urged the federal government to investigate "a number of breweries around the country which are owned in part by alien enemies." In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson instituted partial prohibition to conserve grain for the war effort. Beer was limited to 2.75 percent alcohol content and production was held to 70 percent of the previous year's production. In September, the president issued a ban on the wartime production of beer. National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain should be made into bread for fighting men and not for making liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew." Unsuccessfully, the brewing industry argued that taxes on liquor were paying more for the war effort than were liberty bonds. Yet even after Prohibition was enacted, many ethnic Americans viewed beer or wine drinking as an integral part of their culture, not as a vice. The 1800s and early 1900s was a hotbed for anti-immigrant views, most particularly those immigrants with rather lively cultures, such as the Germans and Irish. Those stereotypes of the Germans and their beer and the Irish and their whiskey came from somewhere right?
- “For the work of a day, for the taxes we pay, for the laws we obey, we want something to say.”The women's suffrage movement began in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY. It was here that suffragists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, drafted a Declaration of Sentiments that included demanding the right to vote for women. The Declaration of Sentiments was based on the Declaration of Independence. The suffrage movement in 1869 split into the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) led by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell. The NWSA was seen as the more radical of the two organizations, while the AWSA was more conservative. The suffrage movement gained a great deal of strength after the passage of the 15th amendment which, in 1870, guaranteed black men the right to vote, but did not mention women. After a number of years it became clear that it was not in the best interest of the movement to have two separate organizations, and in 1890 the two organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Suffragists then concentrated on producing reforms on a state level. In 1893 women got the vote in Colorado, followed by Utah (1896), Idaho (1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona (1912), Kansas (1912), Oregon (1912), Illinois (1913), Nevada (1914) and Montana (1914). In the early 1900s, the suffrage movement attracted a new crop of women to its ranks. Women such as Carrie Chapman Cat and Maud Wood Park attracted women from the middle class to the movement, while other women such as Alice Paul, Harriot E. Blatch, and Lucy Burns attracted women from the working class. Suffragists organized marches and parades as forms of active protest. This picture on the slide is a women’s march. They carried banners, American flags, and shouted slogans or sang catchy little jingles. In 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns formed their own, more militant organization, the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage. This group would eventually evolve into the National Women’s Party in 1917. Paul’s group participated in huge pickets, including a daily picket of the White House. Paul was arrested and sentenced to seven months in prison, but went on a hunger strike and was released. Due to this picketing, 500 women were arrested and 168 were jailed for impeding traffic. By 1918, in the midst of World War I, Woodrow Wilson stated that women's suffrage was needed as "war measure." The House of Representatives passed an amendment granting women's suffrage, but the Senate defeated it. In February of 1919, another amendment was presented to Congress, but this also did not pass. By May of 1919, the amendment was passed by the House and Senate. By 1920, the 19th amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the states.The passing of this amendment and the ratification of it by the 36 states needed was strongly influenced by the past political activism of women throughout the 19th century surrounding prohibition and their fierce defense of the home. They proved themselves in men’s eyes through pressure politics, which was popular at the time in the prohibition movement, to be “worthy” of voting. The struggle for suffrage also brought together women from all classes, white and African American, which was not to say that they were united. There was still the rampant racism; and the women especially feared that if the African American women openly participated side by side with white women in the movement then they would lose the support of the south. Remember, this is also the era of the second generation of the Ku Klux Klan, who supported the protection of the home the same as the women’s groups did. This fear would invade every motion that women attempted throughout the prohibition era.After women earned their voting rights, the women’s suffrage organizations collapsed into the League of Women Voters in 1920 and other various women’s rights organizations. Many decided to remain nonpartisan, and the League of Women Voters which is still around, still is nonpartisan.
- In 1920, both Democrats and Republicans recognized women’s issues in their platforms, taking women at their word that they would use their votes as a powerful political tool. They opened up places within the organizational structure of their parties for female members, although the positions granted were marginal in terms of power or influence. Women became officeholders as well; only a handful were elected to the U.S House of Representatives (7 in 1928) and none to the senate but hundreds served at the state level in legislatures and executive positions earmarked as women’s jobs, such as secretary of education and secretary of state. They were still struggling with the stereotype that their place was to be involved in matters of the home, which in reality is how they manipulated their way into the vote. Many campaigns in the 1800s and early 1900s centered around their right to decide about issues involving home matters. However, being stereotyped into specific roles in government significantly reduced or inhibited their ability to make the impacts they desired in local, state, and national government.Also, as we discussed earlier, their fight for prohibition helped them gain the respect to earn their right to vote. However, as the 1920s progressed, and Prohibition fell even more out of favor than it already was, the women’s association with the movement and law hindered their participation in governmental affairs. Because of the nation’s wariness and pure hatred for prohibition, many of the other progressive reforms and ideas presented by the women lobbyist groups were passed and then repealed or just plain ignored.Throughout the 1920s, women’s organization fought for enforcement of the prohibition laws. A 1925 poll of 270,000 Americans revealed that women were more satisfied with conditions under Prohibition than were men and were more likely to consider Prohibition enforceable. Republican leaders believed that “in several states women hold the balance of power.” Which appeared to hold some truth behind it. In 1928, the voter turnout for the presidential election was 25 percent higher than in the 1924 campaign, and observers attributed the difference to women, effectively electing Herbert Hoover. Recent studies of the election confirm this, stating that the voter turnout constituted women as 49 percent of the 1928 voters in comparison to 35 percent in 1924. Hoover was largely supported by the women because of his support and defense of the home. The public believed at the time that Hoover won because of Prohibition and Prohibition won because of women.
- The Women's Joint Congressional Committee was formed in 1920 to advance the legislative agenda of the women's organizations.It was an umbrella organization of approximately ten women's and social reform groups. More organizations joined a few years later to promote legislation against lynching and for maternity and infant health protection (including support for the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act), independent citizenship for married women (as partially realized in the 1922 Cable Act), funding for the federal women's and children's bureaus, and creation of a Department of Education. One group that did not join the WJCC was the National Woman's Party (NWP), the leading proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which NWP chair Alice Paul had drafted in 1923. The WJCC resisted the ERA as a threat to the sex-based protective labor legislation that its members had fought for years to secure. They established committees on law enforcement to lobby in favor of stringent dry legislation. In 1923 it warned politicians that were they to weaken enforcement efforts they would face “feminine anger.” Fortunately for the politicians, Carry Nation died in 1902.In 1925, the friction among the various women’s organizations began to bubble to the surface. Conservative women’s groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution criticized the WJCC for supporting such controversial measures as the child labor amendment. Disturbed by these accusations of radicalism and frustrated with flagging enforcement, the WCTU resigned from the WJCC in August of 1927. After 1927, the League of Women Voters did not endorse Prohibition publicly, though they still held particular pro-prohibition slants in their publications. The Woman’s Journal also ran articles endorsing both wet and dry viewpoints. The editors explained that “dry though we are, we admit there is another side, sincerely held by many people, and we believe no good cause is hurt by arguments in opposition.”Prohibition itself is looked back on today as largely considered a gender issue. At the time it was the hotbed topic that writers considered the single most important issue affecting women and women’s political participation. In 1930, in “Anti-Prohibitionette,” Margaret Culkin Banning asserted that Prohibition was the “first political issue that has absolutely captured the imagination of the women of the country… I do not mean to juggle importances or make light of great hopes and conceptions. But it is a fact that the average woman will grow vague and disinterested in any prolonged discussion about most political subjects, and concentrated and eager in talking about prohibition.”However, the women who fought so hard for their families in favor of prohibition were aging. Their children were growing up and forming opinions of their own. Just as their mothers were attempting to buck the stereotype they seemed to have been locked into in the government and political systems, their daughters were bucking the stereotypes that their mothers handed down to them as pious individuals who prided home and hearth above all else. While women in the early to mid 19th century drank minutely at home generally, these women discovered the speakeasies and dark alleys of this new age. Skirts became shorter – or were rolled shorter once they left the house according to my grandmother, the materials the dresses were made out of were lighter and more eye catchingly adorned, jewelry became more daring… In short, these young women were in a rebellion. Look at these women’s clothing, with their skirts pulled up even higher, their shoes strappy and revealing even. (Flip back to other slide) Now compare it to these women marching in the parade. Granted, this could be a picture taken in the winter time, but look at their style of dress, down to the hats that even cover a lot of their heads. This younger generation coming of age in the 1920s during the maligned prohibition rebelled against the system, much like a good deal of the country. There was money to be had in bootlegging, running saloons, and corruption. But there’s no better way to show you how this new woman, commonly called flappers, acted than to show you a video. Pay attention to how they’re acting around each other, in public, and the style of clothing they were wearing.
- By the end of the decade, the women’s rights organizations and lobbies were shakey; some were falling apart completely. Some due to lack of acceptance of their male counterparts and politicians who had only paid lipservice to their demands and requests. Others because of their own internal fighting. What’s that old horrible joke about if you get three women together? Two of them are going to go off and talk about the third one, that’s pretty much the way things went down.
- So what did the women’s involvement in the prohibition era leave us?