American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition.

• Author: Baker, Paula

By Kenneth D. Rose New York: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. 230. $16.95 paper.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, groups of Americans joined together to baffle the evils of liquor. Some, like the Washingtonians in the 1820s and 1830s, vowed to abstain and to support their fellow members' pledges to stay away from drink. For others, such voluntary measures were admirable but sadly lacking as a weapon against the danger the saloon posed to families, to productive labor, and to the nation's moral core. In the 1850s thirteen states passed so-called Maine Laws, which banned the sale of alcohol, although appellate courts in eight of those states overturned the laws, and meager provision for enforcement doomed them in the rest. New efforts to use the state to enforce sobriety emerged in the late nineteenth `century. The Republican Party, feeling pressure from its abstinent, native-born, Protestant constituency, promoted high license fees for saloons to raise the prices of beer and whiskey, and local option provisions that allowed counties and townships to vote themselves dry. In parts of the Midwest, where prohibition sentiment ran highest, new state laws tightly restricted the sale of liquor. Finding the Republicans too irresolute and state and local laws too feeble, prohibitionist agitators moved into pressure politics at the national level. The Anti-Saloon League extracted prohibitionist pledges from candidates and campaigned against those who refused to commit to the cause. Their crusade culminated in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which took effect in 1920.

Even before women gained the fight to vote, the liquor question engaged their energies more than any other issue. At first their part was relatively small. In the early nineteenth century, a few middle-class Protestant women spoke out on the blight of liquor: drink, they said, was the supreme threat to the happy home, because the saloon lured men away from it and too often made them abusive toward their wives and children on their return. Working-class women formed Mary Washington chapters to support their men's pledges. By the late nineteenth century, liquor was the premier women's issue. In small cities and towns across the Midwest and Northeast, women staged prayer vigils in saloons and worked polling places to urge men to vote against liquor. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), organized in 1874, became under the leadership of Frances Willard the...