Women Against Prohibition

Abstract

Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the national prohibition amendment. Frances Willard, Anna Gordon, Ella Boole, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union were prominent any man or male organization in the drive to dry up the United States.' During the 1920s, the amendment was widely assumed to be unrepealable, no matter how many people opposed it nor how frequently it was violated. Surely, the argument ran, the drys could always manage to block constitutional revision by holding on to at least one house in each of thirteen state legislatures,2 especially since American women (now fully enfranchised) could be counted upon for nearly unanimous support of prohibition. There is much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, said Senator Morris Sheppard, one of its authors, as there is for a humming-bird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.3 Yet the contemporary view that prohibition was impregnable and that women would stymie its repeal proved false. As they had at every stage of the prohibition battle, women played an extremely important role in its final phase, the overturning of the Eighteenth Amendment.