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THE END OF GENDER SOLIDARITY: The History of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform in the United States, 1929-1933
With the establishment of Prohibition in the United States in 1920, the American public believed that women stood solidly behind the legislation because it would reduce the evils long associated with male drunkenness. The formation in 1929 of an anti-Prohibition women's group, the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, challenged this notion of a unified woman's voting bloc. This article explores the WONPR, arguing that its members shared with women Prohibitionists the desire to protect the home but opposed Prohibition as an act of state force. The dispute among organized women over Prohibition is important because it shows that the struggle over special labor legislation was not the only sign that gender unity had died.
Recognizing that the issue of alcohol reform led great waves of women to enter public life, historians have positioned women as a major political force behind Prohibition.(1) While many women supported a total ban on alcoholic beverages, however, others organized against Prohibition. Women opponents advocated temperance, but objected to state intervention in private life. The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), a women-only political group formed in 1929 and lasting until the end of Prohibition in 1933, opposed government-forced abstinence from alcoholic beverages. While other political organizations -- in particular the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a group that claimed to speak for all women -- believed that Prohibition protected the home and family from the violence and immorality associated with alcohol, the women of the WONPR argued that Prohibition exacerbated the evils it was designed to combat. Defining temperance as an act of self-restraint and Prohibition as an act of state force, the WONPR insisted that the government had no right to be coercive. All women's groups shared a vision based on protection of the home, but the members of the WONPR believed that the widespread bootlegging, smuggling, and imbibing of alcohol under Prohibition fostered an ever-increasing contempt for law and that this attitude undermined the American home and family. To preserve order, the WONPR opposed Prohibition. As the organization grew, the notion of a political woman's bloc, so sacred to both supporters and opponents of woman's suffrage...