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.
Susan B. Anthony
Full name: Susan B. Anthony
Lived: 15 February 1820-13 March 1906
Nationality: United States
Occupation: social reformer, women’s rights activist
We know Susan B. Anthony as a foremost women’s rights activist, though like other early suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer, her beginnings in social activism were rooted in temperance and abolitionism. Anthony understood that temperance and women’s rights were linked. Even though heavy drinking—and the liquor traffic that sustained it—was largely a male activity, its burdens in terms of domestic violence and familial poverty were disproportionately borne by women, who were legally, economically, and politically powerless. Anthony wrote that it is woman’s “right and her duty speak out against the liquor traffic and all men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain, or countenance it.”
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