Jeremy D. Baker , Repealing Gender Norms: Women and Prohibition (2006)

The nation ratified the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16, 1920.  The significant text read, “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.”  A mere thirteen years later, these words would be repealed. 

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, society held strict views on the relationship between gender and alcohol. In this era, public drinking was one of the most gender-segregated activities in America. For men, drinking might take place at home, at the saloon, and perhaps even at work. Women, however, had comparatively fewer options. Social custom, and sometimes laws, prevented women from drinking at the saloon. Perhaps more than any other single cause, it is this link between alcohol and masculinity that would ultimately spawn the prohibition movement of the early twentieth century.

Driven by a combination of “religious faith mixed with a desire to improve human life” those who opposed drinking came to be known as drys. Influenced by the religious rival movement, the drys began to evangelize their belief in temperance.  Social reformers of the Progressivism era also saw an opportunity to further their goals using Temperance, arguing that the social and economic harm caused by alcohol greatly outweighed an individual’s right to drink.

In 1917, with the nation on the verge of war, Congress passed a variety of laws that it might not have approved during peacetime.  With the help of dry advocates, prohibition came to be seen as a means to provide additional resources for the war effort. On January 16, 1919, less than one year after Mississippi became the first state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, Nebraska completed the ratification process.

During this time of national prohibition, alcohol remained readily available and, in most instances, legal. The Amendment forced the saloons to close, but Americans continued to drink and new patterns of social interaction began to emerge. As the 1930’s came to a close, women who had come of age during the nightclub era began to question whether or not prohibition had fulfilled it promises. One such woman was Pauline Morton Sabin.

In 1929, Sabin and forty-nine other women founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform.  In leading the WONPR, Sabin demonstrated levels of media and political savvy, which easily surpassed not only that of other female wets, but also that of her dry critics. The WONPR successfully inverted dry rhetoric, re-using it to attack the drys. By the time the WONPR began its campaign the prohibition movement had given rise to this heterosocial nightlife, and there was no turning back.  All these women needed to begin voicing their growing support of repeal was a new rhetoric that would enable them to rebut the dry’s moral condemnation. The WONPR provided this voice, and the strict gender divide no longer existed in the world of alcohol.

Revised July 23, 2003 (MD)