American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition

Kenneth D. Rose

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780814769294
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal.

Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal.

While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative women have too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

CHAPTER ONE

American Women and the Prohibition Movement

The ladies joining the drinking forces and organized to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment can never make drink decent nor themselves a moral force. The trend of a thousand years is in the opposite direction and it will continue in that direction.

—Carrie Chapman Catt, 1930

The beginnings of a revolution in American feminist politics started off innocuously enough at a congressional hearing in 1928. At that hearing Ella Boole, president of the WCTU and avid supporter of prohibition, proclaimed, “I represent the women of America.” Listening to Boole was Pauline Sabin, a Republican national committeewoman and formerly a supporter of prohibition herself. Sabin recalled saying to herself, “Well lady, here’s one woman you don’t represent.”¹ For a prominent Republican woman to express doubts about prohibition just ten years earlier would have been almost unthinkable. In those days, dry advocates were predicting that the passage of prohibition would herald the dawn of a new age and that by halting the “liquor traffic,” many of society’s other ills would also be eliminated, thereby bringing humanity to the verge of a new era. The claims made by prohibitionists, both male and female, were nothing less than millennial. The WCTU declared that “in the history of Christian civilization it [the prohibition amendment to the Constitution] will rank with the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation.” When the Eighteenth Amendment was approved by a wide margin in 1919, many believed that their vision of a liquor-free world would soon be realized.²

Prohibition, unfortunately, did not produce all the results expected of it, and produced other results that were both unexpected and unwelcome. These results included the growth of organized crime syndicates to supply illegal liquor (and an accompanying increase in violence), an epidemic of corruption among public officials, spiraling enforcement costs, a court system clogged with prohibition cases, class inequities in the law, and the willingness of persons of all classes to ignore this law. Although their efforts were poorly organized until at least 1926, representatives from labor, big business, and the intelligentsia all declared themselves quite early in favor of repealing, or at least modifying, prohibition. (The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, the main male-dominated repeal group, was incorporated in 1921.) American women, however, showed little inclination to organize against a law whose progress had claimed the energies of so many generations of women reformers.

Thus, while it was obvious by the late 1920s that prohibition had its problems, for a large number of American women the menace of alcohol was still best personified both in the liquor traffic of the bad old days before prohibition and in the contemporary threat of prohibition repeal. Ella Boole insisted that prohibition had been a remarkable success story, claiming that “the American home is brighter, better, more homelike and there is more joy in the lives of the average American family because of prohibition.”³ Boole observed that women had always been the ones to pay the price for male drinking in the past and argued that they would be the ones paying the price in the future if prohibition were repealed. To Boole, the logic was inescapable: “wherever men drink, women are bound to suffer.”⁴ Evangeline Booth of the Salvation Army agreed, calling liquor a “masculine indulgence”: “Where it is legalized, it reduces women to an economic inferiority. It is to me unthinkable that the American woman, having achieved her emancipation from this curse, will return to the bondage of beer and the humiliation of the old Saturday night.”⁵ To Booth, drunkenness was “the greatest curse ever to come into the world.”⁶

Other women, however, had come to the painful conclusion that the destructiveness of alcohol was now embodied in prohibition itself, a reform that had begun life as a benevolent Dr. Jekyll but had appallingly transformed into a hideous, mocking Mr. Hyde. Pauline Sabin, who had been active in politics throughout the 1920s and had been the first woman to serve on the Republican National Committee, was one who had initially supported prohibition, explaining that “I felt I should approve of it because it would help my two sons. I thought a world without liquor would be a beautiful world.” By the late 1920s, however, Sabin was one among many women who had traveled a long road, from the “beautiful world” that prohibition had promised to a realm that she believed had been perverted by lawlessness and licentiousness. “The young see the law broken at home and upon the street. Can we expect them to be lawful?” asked Sabin. “Today in any speakeasy in the United States you can find boys and girls in their teens drinking liquor, and this situation has become so acute that the mothers of the country feel something must be done to protect their children.”⁷

The alarm that many women were expressing about the effects of prohibition cut across party lines. Emma Guffey Miller, a Democratic party leader from Pennsylvania, called prohibition a “colossal failure” and claimed that ten years of prohibition had resulted in “more and more money spent for illegal liquor, more and more bootleggers plying their illicit trade, more and more night clubs enticing the young through the lure of liquor, more and more road houses opened as places for liquid refreshment and assignation and more and more disrespect for law.”⁸ Convinced that morality in the home would continue to deteriorate as long as prohibition remained the law, Sabin and other influential women formed the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) in 1929.

The apostasy of this women’s stand against prohibition and the subsequent impact of women’s repeal organizations can be understood only in the context of developments of the previous century, when women’s support of temperance and prohibition reform became axiomatic in American politics. Feminine advocacy of temperance was only one element of a maternalist philosophy that emerged out of complex social, economic, and religious developments that began in antebellum America. Home protectionism, as this philosophy would become known, represented a domestic ideal under which middle-class women assumed responsibility for the moral arrangements of the bourgeois hearth. An amalgam of several elements, home protectionism drew on the so-called separation of spheres, Protestantism’s elevation of woman as morally superior to man, and the Arminian activism of the Second Great Awakening.⁹

Home protectionist ideas and women’s assertions of moral authority first converged with the liquor issue in an antebellum society that was besotted with drink. In the same decades in which women were establishing primacy over domestic morality, Americans were going on an alcoholic binge the likes of which had never been seen before, and has not occurred since. While the problems associated with alcohol use are considerable in our own era—almost 2.4 gallons of absolute alcohol per person consumed by the drinking-age population in 1989—we are abstemious by antebellum standards: In 1830, it is estimated that Americans of drinking age were consuming over 7 gallons of pure alcohol per year—an alcoholic plague of biblical proportions.¹⁰ Why it was that Americans consumed so much alcohol in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century is a matter of some debate, but it was an urban as well as a rural phenomenon and seemed to be rooted in anxieties generated by a society in extreme flux.¹¹ It is also important to note the great disparity between male drinkers and female drinkers in their consumption of distilled liquor. According to one estimate men were outdrinking women and children during this period by a ratio of five to one, with one-half of the adult male population accounting for two-thirds of total spirits consumption.¹²

A genuine civic alarm that intemperance was threatening the foundations of the young republic led to the formation of the first great American temperance societies, but there were many other reasons for temperance activism. The increasing need for employers to maintain a sober work force, the proselytizing morality that emerged from the Second Great Awakening, and the aspirations of a redefined middle class that increasingly saw the consumption of alcohol as inappropriate were all elements of the temperance impulse. For women the stakes were especially high. As late as 1850 wife beating “with a reasonable instrument” was legal in nearly every state, with the consequence that if a woman found herself saddled with a drunken, abusive husband, she had few legal options with which to protect herself (ills. 1 and 2).¹³ In 1821, for instance, Margaret Ramsay applied for a divorce in Tennessee, testifying that her husband whipped her during bouts of drunkenness, held a knife to her throat, brought prostitutes into the house (and contracted venereal disease from one of them), provided her with only one dress, and would not allow her to visit her friends. Ramsay’s divorce petition was denied.¹⁴ Such horrifying circumstances led some temperance reformers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to advocate liberalized divorce laws as part of their antidrink programs.¹⁵

The earliest antebellum temperance organizations often excluded women from membership because of a pervasive belief that public female participation in the temperance debate was not seemly and that women could best advance the cause of temperance by exercising “moral suasion” at home. This idea, that woman was endowed with unique moral qualities and that the application of her moral goodness could produce a decisive influence from within the domestic realm, put a premium on womanly responsibilities that included the maintenance of a temperate home environment. The temperate home quickly became the cornerstone of home protection. By 1841 Catharine Beecher was proclaiming, “Intemperance in drink has produced more guilt, misery, and crime, than any other one cause. And the responsibilities of a woman, in this particular, are very great; for the habits and liabilities of those under her care will very much depend on her opinions and practice.”¹⁶ A decade later, as increasing numbers of women were involving themselves in social purity movements, Mary C. Vaughan, president of the Daughters of Temperance, insisted, “There is no reform in which woman can act better or more appropriately than temperance.”¹⁷

Not surprisingly, temperance soon became a signifier of class. In antebellum Oneida County, New York, for instance, intemperance was viewed “as the classic precipitant of downward mobility” (ill. 3), whereas abstinence was “the highway to wealth … a sure guarantee of respectability, reliability, and general moral and economic worth.”¹⁸ Changes in the workplace also greatly contributed to changing views of alcohol use. As artisan shops were “rationalized” in response to the creation of a national market, liquor was banished from the shop floor, and drinking became weighted with symbolic significance. Workers now saw alcohol use as emblematic of an “autonomous working-class social life,” while the middle class associated liquor with “sullen and disrespectful employees, runaway husbands, paupers, Sabbath breakers, brawlers, theatergoers”—in other words, the “drink-crazed proletariat.” ¹⁹

Most antebellum women’s temperance organizations had a Protestant, middle-class (rather than working-class) orientation, and while women in these groups were genuinely moved by the plight of their fellow human beings laboring under the curse of drink, they also tended to believe that the victims of such a curse could only transform their lives by embracing the values and morals that temperance women themselves personified. The elimination of alcohol was an especially crucial issue to the many reformers who believed that liquor not only imperiled the individuals that used it, but also spread its “contagion” throughout the community. Referring to antebellum alcohol use, the American Temperance Society observed:

If some fatal plague, of a contagious character, were imported into our country, and had commenced its ravages in our cities, we should see the most prompt and vigorous measures at once adopted to repress and extinguish it: but what are the most fearful plagues that ever carried death and havoc in their train through the eastern countries compared with this? They are only occasional; this is perennial.²⁰

To counteract this threat, middle-class temperance women began the process of extending their own domestic values to the rest of society by expanding the idea of “home” to include the entire community. This moral colonialism could take several forms. For instance, women’s temperance groups frequently wrote letters to women in the community who made “too free use” of alcohol. Such letters “warned of consequences such as illness, loss of reputation, suicidal passion, or an eternity in hell, and then appealed on grounds of female solidarity: ‘Do regard your reputation, your influence, the happiness and respectability of your friends—regard the honor and dignity of the female sex.’ “²¹ Middle-class women also began venturing into the neighborhoods of the poor and working class on home visits, with one of the objects being the imposition of the standards of the bourgeois home on the lower classes.²² When, as it frequently happened, home visitors encountered a way of life that was disturbingly unlike their own, as well as evidence that lower classes did not, or could not, maintain middle-class standards, the conclusion was often that the residents of these neighborhoods were guilty of “a belligerent iniquity.”²³

While the degree to which poor and working-class women shared, or at least aspired to, the domestic philosophy of their middle-class counterparts is a matter of some debate, there is at least one important exception to the middle-class character of most women’s temperance groups. That exception was the Martha Washingtonians, a working-class women’s auxiliary of the Washingtonian temperance society. Washingtonian women shared with middle-class women their beliefs in the maternal and moral duties of their sex, though as Ruth Alexander observes, these beliefs were shaped not by “domestic privacy and comfort, but by familiarity with poverty, insecurity, and violence.”²⁴ Likewise, the language used by Martha Washingtonians, as Ian Tyrrell has noted, tended to emphasize domestic virtues: one Martha Washingtonian expressed the sentiment that “although duty does not call us to the battle field, or the strife of politics, yet we cannot congeal [sic] the gushing fountain of our heart’s sympathy for a cause which has for its object the restoration of tranquility to the sanctuary of the home.”²⁵

Although the women’s temperance movement was still dominated by moral suasionists in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were some who had begun to pair temperance with woman suffrage, presenting them as two components of a single moral—and political—whole. Two of these women, Susan B. Anthony ...