← Back to the front page

The US Government Poisoned Alcohol to Enforce Prohibition

Khalid Elhassan October 10, 2021 35 min

Patrons enjoying drinks at the Hunt Club. a speakeasy with a filing system listing their 23,000 eligible customers which is checked before a customer gets through the door at this venue that is protected from police prohibition raids. Vintage News Daily

Prohibition - Nineteenth century American women destroying a saloon in their town — Nineteenth-century American women destroying a saloon in their town. Fine Art America

14. The Fight Against Alcohol Birthed the Fight for Women’s Rights

In the 1840s, women began to play a prominent role in an organized effort to address America’s booze problem. It made sense that women would lead that fight, considering how much they suffered from the country’s alcohol epidemic – and they were not even the ones who got to enjoy the drinking. A drunk husband or father was cause for enough misery. Alcoholic male bread winners often squandered their incomes in the emerging saloons, or neglected their work and lost out on income because of the bottle.

Then there was the “syphilis of the innocent“: an epidemic of STDs caught by hubbies in seedy saloons, where clients could find more than just booze, that was then passed on to their wives. It is thus unsurprising that America’s women featured prominently in the ranks of those who most detested alcohol, and deeply loathed not just the drink, but its makers and sellers as well. The fight for suffrage and women’s rights in America began as an offshoot of the fight against alcohol, and many early suffragettes first became politically active in that struggle.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.