Speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink are just one small part of the global story of prohibition. The full story of prohibition—one you’ve probably never been told—is perhaps one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. The call for temperance motivated and aligned activists within progressive, social justice, labor rights, women’s rights, and indigenous rights movements advocating for communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that had become rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world.
From the slums of South Asia, to the beerhalls of Central Europe, to the Native American reservations of the United States, discover 20 key figures from history that you didn’t know were prohibitionists.
Frances E. W. Harper
Full name: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Lived: 24 September 1825-22 February 1911
Nationality: United States
Occupation: poet, writer, social activist
Hailed as the “mother of African American journalism,” F.E.W. Harper’s poems and novels are infused with the lessons of abolitionism, suffragism, and temperance. Less well-known than civil-rights activist Rosa Parks, Harper effectively integrated public transit in the north a century before Parks. An early pioneer of intersectionality, Harper frequently reminded white suffragist audiences of their own privileged racial positions, and their complicity in the subordination of their female African American counterparts. In addition to her writing, she became a foremost activist for temperance and liberation from economic and political subjugation through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from the 1870s through the 1910s.
Recent Comments
There are currently no comments.