Suffrage and Prohibition: A Tale of Unintended Consequences
In June of 1932, Dr. Harry Gossage, Petaluma’s former mayor, signed a resolution along with 41 other Sonoma County physicians calling for the decriminalization of wine and beer. It had been 12 years since Prohibition became the law of the land. With it came many unintended consequences, the most surprising of which was permitting women, previously banned from imbibing in public, to join the party in speakeasies and drink to their hearts’ content.
That taste of personal liberation, along with Margaret Sanger’s recent launch of the Birth Control League and ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote, inspired a generation of young women to energetically push against the barriers of economic, political, and sexual freedom. Breaking one law—in this case, the Volstead Act that enforced Prohibition—gave them an unspoken license to break other social mores of their parents’ Victorian generation.
Scorned by many at the time as outrageous, immoral, and even downright dangerous—the “sex-crazed kid sister of the suffragist”— they tossed off their corsets, bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts, and, bucking all conventions of acceptable female behavior, became “flappers,” the first generation of truly independent American women, imbibing cocktails and dancing to jazz tunes in speakeasies with an abandon never before seen.
Thanks to the unexpected liberating convergence of suffrage and Prohibition, they were able to step down from the confining Victorian pedestal of moral purity, and enter a new realm of permissibility.
The 1932 resolution signed by Dr. Gossage and others came during a presidential election year, as the country was entering its third year of the Great Depression. One of the wedge issues that year was Prohibition. Republican president Herbert Hoover, who had designated Prohibition the country’s “noble experiment,” supported its continuance.
His challenger, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose platform called for the government taking a major role in addressing the Depression, favored its repeal, looking to restore to the federal treasury billions of dollars in lost tax revenues alcohol sales had generated prior to Prohibition, money now lining the pockets of bootleggers.
But taxes weren’t the only reason people called for Prohibition’s repeal.
The “drys,” or Prohibition advocates, decried alcohol as the root cause of all societal evils, including laziness, promiscuity, violence, crime, and poverty. Eliminate the drink, they claimed, and Americans will be happier, healthier, and more prosperous.
While acknowledging that giving up booze wouldn’t be easy for many, they contended that after some initial resistance, people would reconcile themselves to a world without alcohol, and quickly come to value its moral impact on life. They also predicted that once drinkers with entrenched habits died off, a new generation of young people would have grown up not even knowing what liquor was.
Sadly, they misjudged American youth, of whom, Mark Twain sagely noted, “it is the prohibition that makes anything precious.” That went for much of the rest of the country as well.
People like Gossage who signed the resolution calling for legalization of beer and wine saw it as a means of addressing Prohibition’s adverse consequences. That included restoring respect for the law, reducing the health risks of unregulated alcohol, and providing a “great moral benefit to the nation.”
Ironically, morality was supposedly what had brought Prohibition about in the first place.
The temperance movement began in the 1820s and ’30s as part of a religious American revival called the Second Great Awakening. It was led largely by men until the 1870s, when the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was created.
Petaluma women were at the forefront of the WCTU movement, forming California’s first chapter in 1879. They soon after hosted the first statewide convention, and in 1883, welcomed to town the organization’s dynamic national president, Frances E. Willard.
Under the slogan “do everything,” Willard energized a sisterhood of 150,000 women across the country by pursuing a range of social reforms in addition to temperance that she referred to as Christian Socialism.
They included children’s education, orphanages for street children, asylums for inebriate women, equal pay for equal work, and raising the age of sexual consent from 10 to 16. She also forged an alliance with the woman’s suffrage movement in hopes that women would one day be able to advance those social reforms at the ballot box, using “the ballot as a bayonet.”
To appeal to her more timid conservative members, particularly those on the east coast, who believed that a woman’s place should remain in the home and not in the dirty realm of politics, Willard advocated for “home protection” against the tyranny of drinking men, and the belief that woman’s innate morality would cleanse the nation of its sins.
As a wholesome alternative for men looking to quench their thirst in the saloon, the WCTU installed public water fountains in parks and town squares across the country, including, in 1891, upon the street corner beneath the town clock in Petaluma. The town reportedly had 50 saloons at the time, or one for every 60 residents, a number of them within close proximity of the fountain.
Etched into the side of the Petaluma fountain the ladies of the local WCTU wrote, “Total abstinence is the way to handle the alcohol problem.”
Following Willard’s death in 1898, the national WCTU dropped its support of suffrage, refocusing its efforts strictly on home protection and maintaining the social purity of women.
In turn, the National American Woman Suffrage Association led by Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt at the time, sought to distance themselves from the temperance movement, which they feared had created too many enemies for woman suffrage.
Petaluma’s WCTU chapter, however, retained its support of the suffrage movement, right up until 1911, when women won the right to vote in California.
While women nearly doubled the number of voters in the state, state propositions in 1914 and again in 1916 calling for prohibition of liquor were soundly defeated, indicating that California women were not single-issue voters when it came to alcohol.
Despite Willard’s efforts, the temperance movement itself didn’t gain impactful national momentum until the 1890s, when a group of men formed the Anti-Saloon League, effectively pushing the women of the WCTU to the sidelines. Unlike Willard, the League focused on a single goal of getting rid of alcohol.
It would turn out to be the most effective political group in American history, setting a model for the way politics are still practiced today.
Composed primarily of Methodists and Baptists, the Anti-Saloon League was well funded and highly organized, with a massive printing operation in Ohio that churned out 300 tons of propaganda each month, effectively turning alcohol into a political wedge issue that mobilized supporters across the country. Politicians of either party who opposed Prohibition were met with retribution at the polls from the League’s Christian voter base.
Led by Wayne Wheeler, the League primarily focused their attacks on the beer, wine, and liquor industries, in the belief that alcohol was a drug being pushed upon Americans, and once the pusher was eliminated, people would naturally stop drinking, as temperance, in their view, was the innate state of human beings.
What they either failed or merely chose not to recognize, was that while excessive drinking was indeed a serious problem, especially among the working class, alcoholism was also symptomatic of deeper underlying conditions arising from the massive industrialization, urbanization, and immigration transforming the country, including overcrowding, harsh working conditions, crime, and poverty.
For all their talk of a moral movement to save people from alcohol by getting rid of the saloon, what the Anti-Saloon League and their temperance allies in the WCTU really worried about was who the saloon catered to: the immigrants flooding the country at the turn of the century.
That was certainly true of the temperance movement in Petaluma. Having been settled in the 1850s and ’60s largely by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants from New England, the town experienced its first wave of immigrants in the 1860s with the arrival of the Irish.
They were followed in the 1880s by Swiss Italians from the Canton of Ticino, in the 1890s by Portuguese from the Azores, Germans from the Isle of Fohr, and Danes from Frisia on the North Sea, and finally, in the early 1900s, Eastern European and Russian Jews escaping the pogroms in their home countries.
While these immigrants were eager to begin new lives in Petaluma, they were not willing to give up their native culture, which included their drinking habits. For most of them, drinking was not a moral vice but an integral part of their culture.
At the turn of the century, Petaluma’s saloons were largely affiliated with specific ethnic groups, which helped to keep their native traditions alive, providing spaces where they could converse in their native tongues, or read in their native language. They also served as headquarters for planning dances, festival, lectures, political rallies, and funerals.
But rather than view these various cultures as part of the great American melting pot, the Anti-Saloon League and WCTU saw them as cauldrons of sin and debauchery. What they feared most was that the immigrants represented large numbers of new voters who were going to change the America they knew.
To stop that from happening, they embarked upon a campaign to “Americanize” the immigrants, beginning with shutting down the one of their primary community hubs, the saloon.
For assistance in that effort, they turned to the Ku Klux Klan, which had seen a revival in 1916 following D.W. Griffith’s sensational blockbuster film Birth of a Nation, originally called The Clansman. The Klan viewed their alliance with the Anti-Saloon League as being consistent with their broader mission of purifying the race of the nation.
They also formed an alliance with the U.S. government once Prohibition was imposed, serving as a citizen militia to the Federal Prohibition Bureau, which began deputizing volunteers, including members of the Klan, to expand its ranks in enforcing the new law.
If local law enforcement could not or would not do their duty—largely because they were on the take or else simply looked aside—the Klan stepped in, violently raiding distilleries, speakeasies, and even private homes.
Not surprisingly, they used the laws prohibiting alcohol to wage war against the groups they identified as the enemies of “one hundred percent Americanism”—Catholics, Jews, and Blacks.
In Petaluma, the Klan made its presence well known during the mid-1920s, including staging a cross burning during a rally out near the Petaluma Adobe, a blaze so large it was visible from the downtown.
The Anti-Saloon League had originally launched its campaign to achieve national prohibition through a constitutional amendment in 1913, while celebrating its 20th anniversary at a convention held in Columbus, Ohio. That same year, the League threw their support behind ratification of the 16th Amendment to the constitution, which allowed Congress to begin collecting income taxes.
Up until that time, some 30 to 40 percent of the government’s income since the time of the Civil War had come from alcohol taxes. Passage of the 16th Amendment took away from the alcohol industry one of its major defenses against federal Prohibition, as it eliminated the government’s dependency on alcohol sales taxes.
World War I helped the League’s cause as well. Since most beer brewers were of German decent, the Anti-Saloon League used it’s propaganda machine to equate immigrants, and therefore drinking, with being anti-American.
Six years later, in January of 1919, the Anti-Saloon League was finally able to claim victory for its Prohibition campaign when the 18th Amendment was ratified by the states.
As drinking supplies dwindled during the first few years of Prohibition, the national level of alcohol consumption dropped 70 percent, raising speculation of a new alcohol-free economy.
Real estate developers and landlords looked forward to rising rents as seedy neighborhoods, formerly anchored by saloons, improved. Theater owners anticipated new crowds looking for ways to entertain themselves without alcohol. Manufacturers of chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drinks began ramping up production to meet anticipated demand.
None of it came to pass. Although the overall American economy experienced a boom during the 1920s—including in Petaluma, where the local egg industry provided citizens with one of the highest incomes per capita in the country—Prohibition’s economic impacts were largely negative.
The amusement and entertainment industry saw a decline across the board. Restaurants failed, as they could no longer make a profit without serving beer and wine.
Theater revenues declined, including at Petaluma’s Mystic Theater, which ended up selling out, along with the other theater in town, the Hill Opera House, to a large movie chain.
In addition, the closing of breweries, wineries, distilleries, and saloons eliminated thousands of jobs, including at George Griess’ U.S. Brewery on Upham Street near Bodega Avenue in Petaluma.
But the Volstead Act, the federal law put into place in 1920 to enforce Prohibition, also contained loopholes and legal exceptions that law-abiding citizens quickly began to take advantage of.
For while the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol, it did not ban the possession nor consumption of it. That included alcohol used in medicine.
Prior to Prohibition, the American Medical Association had taken a principled stand against alcohol-based medicines, noting their lacked any proven scientific value. Once Prohibition was imposed however, the medical establishment did an about-face, identifying 27 separate conditions that responded well to alcohol-based medicines, including anxiety, influenza, diabetes, asthma, snake bite, and old age.
Two of the most popular prescriptions were a “hot claret wine gargle” for sore throats and hot toddies for those with colds.
In Petaluma, a plethora of drug stores—Clark, Gossage, Herold, James, Morris, O’Neill, Petaluma Drug, Tuttle—sprang up around town, some reportedly operated by bootleggers who found it easier to start a pharmacy than a speakeasy.
Legitimate drugstore chains also flourished. Walgreens, which had only 20 locations in 1919, grew to more than 600 locations by the early 1930s.
As another exception to the Volstead Act, people were allowed to manufacture up to 200 gallons a year of either cider and wine—an equivalent of 4 gallons a week—for consumption exclusively in the home.
That was good news for Sonoma County grape growers, who, prior to Prohibition, were California’s largest wine producer. While a number of small wineries were forced to close, larger wineries switched to producing sacramental and medicinal wines, and to making chunks of dried grape concentrate called “wine bricks.”
Each brick made a gallon of grape juice, and some came with a “warning” that if left sitting out too long, the juice would ferment and turn into wine. In the first five years of Prohibition, grape acreage in California increased seven-fold, as wine consumption in the U.S. jumped from 70 million gallons to 150 million gallons a year.
Sonoma County was also America’s second-largest hops producer prior to Prohibition, and while a number of breweries had to close down, others transitioned to selling “near beer,” or legal brew that contained no more than the 0.5% of alcohol permitted by the law. Some brewers marketed it as a health drink they called “cereal beverage.”
Others breweries began producing malt syrup, an extract that could be easily made into beer by adding water and yeast and allowing time for fermentation.
While home stills and brewing kits were technically illegal, Petalumans could purchase the parts they need for making stills at places like the original Rex Hardware at Main and B streets across from Center Park.
Despite all of the home brewing and winemaking, what distinguished drinking habits most during Prohibition was the switch from beer and wine to hard liquor as the drink of preference.
By the end of the 1920s, liquor constituted nearly two-thirds of the country’s total alcohol consumption. That was partly because spirits were compact and easier to conceal and transport, and also because of the popularity of the “cocktail.”
Many people who didn’t like the taste of beer, wine, or straight hard liquor, found cocktails irresistible, particularly women.
The irony was that cocktails, which prior to Prohibition had been virtually non-existent, became popular in speakeasies because they masked the foul taste of bathtub gin and moonshine whiskey.
Regardless, cocktail dinner parties at home soon became all the rage, and the social practice of the five o’clock “cocktail hour” became a tradition for many.
Given the secretive nature of speakeasies, it’s impossible to determine how many operated in Petaluma during Prohibition, but from oral accounts there were many.
A number, like Volpi’s on Washington and Keller streets, had been grocery taverns prior to Prohibition. The owners simply sealed off the bar from the rest of the store and provided customers with a secret entrance.
Many former saloons simply switched to operating as soda fountains, with the added treat for certain customers of mixing a little alcohol in with their sodas. One of them was the Mercantile Grill on Main Street, site today of the Starbucks adjacent to Putnam Plaza, which was run during Prohibition by a group of bootleggers known as the Cree Gang. The gang also operated a rod and gun club on the river near Haystack Landing that served as a front for their speakeasy.
Until the Coast Guard stepped up their enforcement efforts, Tomales Bay and the Sonoma coast, with their hidden coves and proximity to San Francisco, served as a smugglers’ paradise for transporting rye whiskey down from Canada.
The Petaluma area, with its rural dairy and chicken ranches, also became a major producer of “jackass brandy,” a bootlegged whiskey that reportedly “bit like a mule and kicked like a horse.”
To disguise their tracks to secret stills on ranches, bootleggers often wore shoes that simulated cow hooves.
In terms of alcohol production, Prohibition served to shut down a multimillion dollar alcohol industry and put it in the hands of homebrewers and craft distilleries around the country. As a result of their combined efforts, by the mid-1920s national alcohol consumption had rebounded to 70 percent of pre-Prohibition levels.
Only now with that consumption came a major decline in respect for the law.
Gil Hall, a colorful attorney known as Petaluma’s “Perry Mason,” defended most of the local bootleggers apprehended by the law. While representing a bootlegger on trial, Hall asked to see the alleged bottle of liquor found on his client. After opening the bottle, Hall drank it dry, proclaiming it wasn’t whiskey at all. With the evidence gone, the case had to be dropped.
A similar case occurred with a jury in Los Angeles, who, asking to see an alleged bottle of moonshine while deliberating in the jury chambers, drained it, resulting in the release of the accused due to lack of evidence.
Apocryphal tales aside, the reality was that during Prohibition alcohol-related crimes overwhelmed both the jails and judicial system, forcing prosecutors to resort for the first time to using mass plea bargains as a means of clearing hundreds of backlogged cases.
The other major problem plaguing Prohibition was the health risk posed unregulated booze. As the black market for bathtub gin and moonshine became more lucrative, bootleggers turned to cheaper sources of alcohol, specifically methanol, or wood alcohol, included in industrial products like fuel and formaldehyde.
Stronger than ethanol, or drinking alcohol, wood alcohol was traditionally “denatured” to make it undrinkable by adding toxic or foul-tasting chemicals to it. Once bootleggers discovered they could hire chemists to re-purify or wash out the noxious chemicals, they began using wood alcohol in their moonshine to cut costs.
In response, the government doubled the amount of poison additive, making it harder to re-purify. As a result, three drinks of booze made with tainted wood alcohol was capable of causing blindness—giving rise to the phrase “being blind drunk”—or even death. During Prohibition an estimated 10,000 Americans died from poison hooch, and thousands were either struck blind or suffered respiratory paralysis.
Seymour Lowman, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition, stated that if a sober America meant people at the fringes of society “dying off from poison hooch, then a good job will have been done.”
Part of what motivated Gossage and physicians around the country to petition for legalizing beer and wine, was the risk that cheap tainted liquor posed to the young, whose consumption of alcohol, contrary to the hopes of the drys, had increased significantly, especially on college campuses, where Prohibition came to be viewed as something to rebel against.
The other unintended group of new drinkers Prohibition ushered in were women. Their new willingness to drink in public—or at least in the semipublic atmosphere of the speakeasy—owed much to the death of the saloon, whose masculine culture could no longer govern the norms of public drinking. Unlike saloons, speakeasies were coed.
Public drinking by women and college youth helped bring about what social scientists call a “normalization of drinking,” which rippled into other parts of society.
In cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, a new generation of mixed-gender and mixed-race pacesetters were rebelling in jazz-filled speakeasies with innovative new dance styles like the Charleston.
Thanks to Hollywood movies, tabloid newspapers, and radio, the new Jazz Age reverberated across the country like a cultural earthquake, shaking the foundations of even small towns like Petaluma.
The common perception of women’s relationship to alcohol perpetuated by the WCTU was largely an adversarial one. In towns like Petaluma, Victorian codes of morality, piety, class structure, and social standing clashed with the image of independent women drinking in public, fostering a stereotype that only dancehall girls and women who sold themselves as prostitutes entered establishments that sold alcohol.
But women on the whole were never as teetotaling as the WCTU made them out to be. Many kept bottles of beer, wine, or alcohol with their kitchen supplies for use in cooking, to be served with a meal, or for a quick nip when the urge arose.
The popular cooking and homemaking books of the time, like Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1861, contained recipes for drinks like Sloe Gin Cocktail, Strawberry Fizz, and Silver Sour.
Other women relied on patent medicines or over-the-counter remedies, such as Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine or Wine of Cardui, marketed as medical panaceas for curing an assortment of ailments. Most of them contained significant levels of alcohol—usually in the range of 20%—leading a number of women to an alcohol addiction.
Women did in fact purchase alcohol from saloons, but those transactions usually took place at the back door, and the liquor purchased was consumed at home. Around the turn of the century, saloonkeepers looking to expand their market began creating what they called “wine rooms,” either at the back of their saloons or upstairs if they had a second floor, for a mixed clientele of “respectable” men and women.
Posted with a “Family Entrance” or “Ladies’ Entrance” separate from the saloon, the layouts often consisted of a hallway with several rooms, each equipped with a table and chairs, perhaps a sofa, and in some rooms enough space for dancing to a gramophone.
Petaluma’s Arcade Saloon on Western Avenue, site today of the Petaluma Textile & Design store next door to Andresen’s Tavern, was one such place, with wine rooms most likely upstairs.
Working-class women in particular began to frequent wine rooms, sometimes exclusively with other women on a “girls night out.”
While middle-class women who largely consigned strictly to homemaker roles, those from working-class backgrounds were often expected to take care of household duties while also working long shifts in often labor-intensive jobs. In Petaluma, those jobs were primarily at the new factories along the east side of the river, including the Carlson-Currier Silk Mill and the nearby Nolan-Earle Shoe Factory.
Authorities eventually grew leery of wine rooms as they tended to foster carousing between men and women, often leading to trysts and violence, the latter usually initiated by married men who discovered their wives in a wine room with another man. Wine rooms in lower-end establishments were often little more than glorified prostitution “cribs” attached to saloons.
That placed wine rooms in the crosshairs of the WCTU’s crusade of social purity for women, leading many cities, including Petaluma, to close them down and initiate laws criminalizing women in spaces designated for drinking.
In Colorado, one of the first states to grant women the vote in 1893, a Denver saloon owner decided to challenge the law, arguing that since women had been given right of suffrage they were “entitled to the same pursuit of happiness as their brothers,” including drinking in his saloon. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that states had to the right to impose restrictions on whom they sold alcohol sold to, including on the basis of gender and race.
A similar incident occurred in Petaluma in 1913, two years after California women won the vote. John Keller operated a saloon in the Mutual Relief Building at the corner of Western Avenue and Kentucky Street with a side entrance for retail liquor sales.
One evening he sold a bottle of liquor to a woman who later was found passed out drunk on the grounds of Lincoln Elementary School at Fifth and B streets. Keller was fined the equivalent of $4,000 in today’s currency, and warned that a second charge of selling liquor to women would result in the loss of his liquor license.
Seven years later, the imposition of Prohibition inadvertently opened up new, uncharted territory. Saloons and liquor stores might have legally barred women, but illegal speakeasies had no such rules. They not only changed how women drank, they allowed them to move into spaces previously reserved exclusively for men.
For a generation ravaged by the carnage of the Great War and the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919, the world had shifted. They no longer viewed life through the rational, moral, and orderly Victorian lens of their parents.
Instead, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” their attitudes shifted to one of irrationality, with humans viewed as neither innately moral nor logical in their behavior, “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”
For young women especially, the forbidden pleasure of drinking in speakeasies or at private parties with friends represented a way of expressing their independence. Yet such newfound freedoms and redefined roles in a libertine era often came with new challenges. Female alcoholism, for one, became a growing problem.
Women weren’t just on the consumption end of Prohibition, they were involved in the craft production. While it’s not known how many women actually entered the bootlegging trade, of those documented, there were certain demographic patterns. Most were mothers or daughters trying to financially support their families. A majority were immigrants who felt justified in their actions since they had come from cultures that didn’t view the creation or consumption of alcohol as a moral issue.
The great “noble experiment” of Prohibition was based on the theory that personal behavior follows structural change. By changing the law of the land—in this case banning alcohol—one naturally would change human behavior, eliminating the sin of drinking.
But women succeeded in flipping that theory on its head. Taking advantage of the underground culture and social chaos created by Prohibition, they used their personal behaviors to express new freedoms that resulted in structural changes to the long-held roles of women in society.
And once Prohibition ended, they were no more willing to give up those new freedoms than they were to give up their cocktails.
By 1932, when Gossage and his fellow physicians got around to issuing their appeal for the legalization of beer and wine, it was widely recognized by everyone excerpt for perhaps the most zealous of the drys that, whatever the intentions of Prohibition, the cure was worse than the disease. For more than a decade, the law meant to foster temperance, order, and law-abiding citizens, had instead ushered in an era of intemperance, excess, and lawlessness.
In 1929, one woman decided to do something about it.
Pauline Morton Sabin was a wealthy, blue blood New York socialite. The first woman ever to serve on the Republican National Committee, she was also a temperance supporter, and a major fundraiser for Republican presidential campaigns during the 1920s.
Sabin however found the hypocrisy of Prohibition intolerable. She was especially repelled by Republican politicians who voted dry and then turned up at her dinner table expecting a drink. She also had a special aversion to the WCTU and the way its president, Ella Alexander Boole, claimed to speak for all American women. Sabin believed that Prohibition had failed and it was the responsibility of American women to do something about it.
In 1929, she formed the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, also known as “The Crusaders.” Within a year the group had more than a million members, three times that of the WCTU.
Sabin and her organization began lobbying politicians, attending political conventions, and campaigning throughout the country to ratify the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition.
Her justification, like that of presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt, focused solely on economic recovery. After 12 years, Prohibition had cost the federal government $11 billion in lost tax revenue and more than $300 million in enforcement expenses. With the arrival of the Great Depression, Sabin argued that those costs were too large to bear any longer.
The public largely agreed. In November of 1932, they elected Franklin Roosevelt president. A year later, on December 5th, 1933, a majority of states ratified the 21st Amendment, ending Prohibition. Speakeasies everywhere threw open their doors.
With Prohibition finally ended, the word “saloon” virtually disappeared from America’s vocabulary. New establishments that referred to themselves as “cocktail lounges” and “taverns,” and who welcomed both men and women, sprang up all over.
In Petaluma, they included Andresen’s Tavern, located within steps of the town clock, below which sits the WCTU water fountain with its engraved message, “Total Abstinence is the Way to Handle the Alcohol Problem.”
Only now, the water fountain would forever stand as a monument to the surprising unintended consequences of Prohibition.
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A version of this article was delivered as a talk sponsored the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum as part of their 2020 exhibit, Petaluma’s Participation in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, curated by Paula Freund and Katherine Rinehart.
SOURCES:
Books, Journals, , Magazines, Websites
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the film “Prohibition,” 2011, pbs.org. pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
Jane Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, IL: U Illinois Press, 1986).
Erin Blakemore, “How Prohibition Encouraged Women to Drink,” JSTORdaily.org.
Jack S. Blocker, Jr., “Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation,” American Journal of Public Health, February 2006; 96(2): 233-243.
Kat Eschner, “Why the Ku Klux Klan Flourished Under Prohibition,” December 5, 2017, Smithsonianmag.com.
Nicholas Hines, “Prohibition’s Grape Bricks: How to Not Make Wine,” September 17, 2015. Grapecollective.com.
Michael Lerner, “Prohibition: Unintended Consequences,” 2011, pbs.org.
Sally J. Ling, “Gertrude Lythgoe – Fascinating Women of Prohibition,” Florida’s history Detective blog. Sallyjling.org.
Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (NY: Norton, 2015).
Mary Murphy, “Bootlegging Mothers and Drinking Daughters” American Quarterly, 1994, 46(2), 174-94.
Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (NY: Scribner, 2011).
Tanya Marie Sanchez, “The Feminine Side of Bootlegging,” Louisiana History, Autumn 2000, 41(2), 403-433.
Jim Vorel, “How Progressives, Racists, Xenophobes and Suffragists Teamed up to Give America Prohibition, Paste magazine, February 25, 2019. Pastemagazine.com.
Elaine Weiss, The Woman’s Hour (NY: Viking Press, 2018).
Newspapers
Fresno Morning Republican: “The Saloon’s Wine Room for Women,” July 31, 1902.
New York Times: Jennifer Harlan, “A Splashy Start to Prohibition, 100 Not-so-dry Januaries Ago,” January 3, 2020.
Petaluma Argus: “Local Saloon Man Pays Fine,” September 18, 1913; “Ku Klux Klan Held Outdoor Initiation Saturday,” June 1, 1925.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hoover Sees No Hope for Wine and Beer,” September 8, 1931; “Medicos for Modification,” June 4, 1932; Chris Samson, “Petaluma Old-timers Share Stories of Smuggling, Stills, Raids and Speakeasies,” October 14, 2011.
Petaluma Courier: “Sold Liquor to Woman¬–Is Fined,” September 19, 1913.
Stockton Daily Evening Record: “Beast and the Jungle,” January 10, 1910.
