Feminine Spirits
"I think it is fairly obvious," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1940, "that women have voted on most questions as individuals and not as a group, in much the same way that men do, and that they are influenced by their environment and their experience and background just as men are." Eighty-five years later, it seems many in this country have not absorbed Roosevelt’s lesson. The idea that women would turn out en masse for Kamala Harris because of her position on abortion or subsidized child care turned out to be nothing more than a fever dream of the pink-hat wearing crowd. Roosevelt’s observation—which is reported in Gioia Diliberto’s lively new history Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition—should not be interpreted to mean that there is nothing about being a woman that informs one’s vote. As she mentions, "experience" matters. But it’s not the only thing, and being a woman may inform votes in ways that are not easily predictable.
Prohibition was thought to be a women’s issue because temperance was a women’s issue. And temperance was a women’s issue because the consequences of alcohol abuse were most often felt by women and children. If we’re being honest, they still are. As Sarah Hepola observed in her book Blackout, when men get drunk they "do things to the world." When women are drunk, "things are done to them."
In the early 19th century, the average American over the age of 15 was consuming over seven gallons of liquor per year. Given that many didn’t drink at all, a significant portion of those who did would easily qualify as alcoholics today. Most were men. Many drank away their paychecks, leaving women and children destitute. Domestic violence and child abuse were also a significant consequence of widespread inebriation.
It was no surprise, then, that the overlap between the women’s suffrage movement and the temperance movement was significant. Leaders of both saw it as their role to protect women from the consequences of men’s thoughtlessness and violence. Providing women with the ability to divorce abusive or neglectful husbands so they could care for themselves and their children was vital.
It was when temperance morphed into Prohibition that women started to diverge from each other. Diliberto writes that the "transformation of the temperance movement into a legal crusade [for Prohibition] coincided with a huge influx of German and Irish immigrants to America’s shores. Most of these immigrants lacked the Puritan strains that ran through many American communities, and thus many newcomers found wine, beer, and spirits complements to meals and socializing." It was "almost overnight" she quotes one historian as saying that the "temperance cause became a movement for prohibition."
But women still remained at the forefront. Ella Boole, the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, led the fight. Born in 1858, Ella excelled in school, studying Greek, Latin, math, and science. And "she won several regional oratorial contests." She married a pastor 30 years her senior. It was not long before she was a young widow with children to support.
She went to work for the Presbyterian church and the WCTU. In one of her first public speeches before a demonstration of some 2,000 people on the Capitol in Washington, D.C., she proclaimed that Prohibition "is a proper subject for Constitutional Law … for the liquor traffic interferes with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." She noted that "modern methods in medicine and philanthropy emphasize the necessity for the removal of preventable causes of disease, poverty and crime." And she concluded that prohibition of liquor traffic would "typify … the removal of the greatest preventable cause of intemperance, disease, vice and crime." As interested as we are today in "prevention" as a solution to the problems that plague the most vulnerable members of society (like obesity), substance abuse rarely makes the list of things we can or need to prevent. Boole’s talk is at once very modern but also a throwback to a time when we understood clearly the dangers alcohol and drugs presented and were willing to use the law to stop them.
Boole’s nemesis, Pauline Morton Sabin, a New York socialite, founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. A savvy political operative, Sabin knew women (and men) were not single-issue voters. She switched support for political candidates depending on who was the frontrunner and then tried to influence whoever was in power. Most interestingly, though, even Sabin supported Prohibition before she opposed it. "I was one of the women who favored Prohibition when I heard it discussed in the abstract," she wrote in 1928. Only once she saw the law’s impact did she determine it was a failure. "It is true we no longer see the corner saloon but in many cases has it not merely moved to the back of the store or up or down one flight under the name of a ‘speak-easy’?"
It is worth dwelling for a moment on the fact that even the biggest opponents of Prohibition actually wanted everyone to stop drinking—or at least to drink much less. And if the policy had worked, they would have been fine with it. Today, when we think of Prohibition, we simply assume that all of its right-thinking opponents simply cared about personal liberty, that the fight against Prohibition was a fight for freedom. In fact, they too were concerned about the effects of alcohol—on disease, vice, and crime, but worried that the law was not an effective way to mitigate the problem.
The third woman Diliberto profiles is Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who served as the country’s top enforcer of Prohibition. The first female U.S. assistant attorney general, Willebrandt was widely assumed at the time to be in favor of the law, but Diliberto shows she was merely in favor of enforcing the law. And enforce it she did. Knowing that many federal and local officials were on the take, Willebrandt organized raids using outsiders and even cut the telephone lines so that officers she suspected of corruption would be unable to warn drinking establishments about the raids. She argued more than 40 cases before the Supreme Court in this field. She was nothing if not dedicated to her job, working 18-hour days, motivated by personal ambition as well as a desire to uphold the law. She never achieved her goal of becoming attorney general or being appointed a federal judge.
It is noteworthy that the only woman Diliberto can find who was a true opponent of the government banning the liquor trade was a woman who actually ran speakeasies. It’s not clear that Tex Guinan actually belongs in the company of the other women in this book, who were highly accomplished, passionately devoted to their causes, and astute political operatives. Guinan, by contrast, seemed to cultivate success first through her own performance career and then by corralling troops of young girls—some of them underage—to perform in her establishments. Her shifting mob alliances were probably a sight to behold but she is hardly much of a "firebrand" and Diliberto’s story doesn’t benefit from focusing on Guinan.
Some of the stories of these "firebrands" will seem surprisingly modern. How do they get what they want out of their personal lives—companionship, romance, motherhood—while at the same time achieving such high levels of professional success? And when they want to achieve professional success, to what extent do they play up their feminine wiles, taking advantage of media coverage that describes their appearances and dealing flirtatiously with business associates? And to what extent do they play a men’s game, engaging in politics without sentiment, the way they see men doing all around them?
Trying to find a worthy comparison for Prohibition is difficult today. It was an issue that divided both men and women along different lines and produced strange political bedfellows. Diliberto seems sure that the Dobbs decision would have "appalled" Willebrandt because she herself once considered an abortion. But whether she would have objected to the laws about abortion being decided by voters in states is hard to say. In fact, after Prohibition was overturned, more than a third of Americans lived in places that were still legally dry. Willebrandt didn’t reside in one of them, but Diliberto doesn’t present evidence that she particularly objected to them either.
Diliberto’s most interesting comparison is with the #MeToo movement because both were focused on "essential protection for women" against "the evils and degradations" of men. In its earliest stages, especially, the #MeToo movement drew women from across the political spectrum as supporters. Whether it was taking down the higher ups at Fox News or NBC, women across the country sympathized with the plight of those who were victimized by powerful men. Similarly, the dreadful effects of alcoholism also knew no racial, political, or class boundaries. But just as with Prohibition, men and women began to question what to do about the problems of sexual harassment in the workplace. Should we "believe all women" no matter the evidence? Should we shame men out of their positions without any kind of trial? And what constitutes harassment? Similarly, a hundred years ago, the problem was not that women didn’t agree on the need for temperance. They just parted ways on how to get there.
Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition
by Gioia Diliberto
University of Chicago Press, 349 pp., $30
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.
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