This article, titled "Why Do We Blame Women For Prohibition?" was the first thing to come up. It basically claims that this is a "gender conspiracy theory" -- some of the rationale it gives includes:
- The actual vote:
- There was no popular referendum on the 18th amendment and most women couldn't vote anyway (this was in the 19th amendment)
- There was only one female congresswoman at the time of the 18th amendment -- yes she voted for it, but she was part of a supermajority
- 46/48 states voted for prohibition, some with unanimity, and state legislatures were 99.8% men
- The lobbying:
- Carrie Nation is viewed as the face of the prohibition movement, but she died almost a decade before the 18th amendment was ratified
- There were several men who were also highly involved (Wayne Wheeler, Neal Dow, William Jennings Bryan, etc.)
Other articles I saw took a different lens. Though they attributed the prohibition movement to women's efforts, they also painted it in a much different light -- like this article, "The Feminist History of Prohibition", which calls the Prohibition movement "the foremost example of American feminism."
I am sure that this misses many other facts but thought that these pieces exhibited some varied points of view. Always interesting to explore different perceptions of history!
Sources:
Politico Magazine, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/13/prohibition-women-blame-history-223972
JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/feminist-history-prohibition/
Anna - really interesting context.
ReplyDeleteI did some more research here that explains why Katie and Tracy refered to it as a "feminist" movement. While women didn't formally have the vote then, they acted as behind-the-scenes advocates for temperance and prohibition given what they perceived to be negative influences from alcohol.
In particular, a TIME article on history and feminism titled "The Surprisingly Complex Link Between Prohibition and Women’s Rights" details the prevailing views at the time: "Men would go to the tavern, drink away mortgage money, drink so much they couldn’t go to work the next day, beat their wives, abuse their children. That’s what launched the beginning of the temperance movement." I believe this is what our speakers were alluding to in class.
I agree that it's not all cut-and-dry. The article also references a series of eight illustrations detailing the above issues by a male British caracaturist. But all of this early advocacy happened in the 1800s - to your point above. It was clearly a long fight - advocacy years in the making.
To me, the most interesting point is the eventual innate linkage between the Prohibition and Women's Suffrage movements: "Americans today are likely to recognize the names of the most famous temperance activists not from that work but from their efforts for women’s suffrage." As the article mentions, Susan B. Anthony believed that the “the only hope” for Prohibition was “putting the ballot into the hands of women.”
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Source cited above: https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffrage-metoo/