via reddit.com
Those chicks hated working women and good times
They hated their husbands bashing them and their children after drinking moonshine, cheating on them with prostitutes then infecting them with the STDs they got while wasting their wages all while not having basic rights afforded to their husbands
Those women often were working women, ya dickhead
Feminism has its roots in the Labour movement
You don’t know shit about what those women went through or why they opposed alcohol or prostitution
Husbands owned their wives wages in those days so yeah she didn’t want him spending all her hard earned cash on a drug that made him more violent and terrible than usual
So many people have a warped view of the temperance movement & the actual motives behind it. They didn’t hate parties and fun. They hated male violence and being owned by drunken assholes.
People know so little about women’s history. Women’s history is very interesting. Everyone should know more about the First and Second Waves of Feminism
There are actually women’s groups today that have successfully lobbied to have alcohol banned in a few provinces in India for the reasons stated above. So yeah, this is still a thing woman are fighting for today in many third world countries. These ARE working women.
It’s absolutely insane the way we teach prohibition and the 19th amendment in this country. It’s always presented as “haha the WOMEN didn’t want us to have any FUN” fun fact women were being beaten by their alcoholic husbands. Whom they couldn’t fucking leave because they couldn’t own property or get decent jobs and had no birth control. So you’ve got 6 kids and no job and your husband’s a drunk, you’re basically trapped.
I’m actually really upset because the temperance movement was not taught like this in any of my history classes.
We were taught prohibition briefly but always made the women seem like they were short sighted wet blankets because it was always heavily emphasized that the illegal alcohol trade made the law ineffective and futile. It was always presented as this ultra fundamentalist, prudish, and shrewish law that everybody else hated (because the effects of alcohol were only depicted as something that brought people together or simply something people enjoyed a whole lot and notat all of how it made men violent leeches in their own families).
The temporariness of prohibition was emphasized and the religious aspects of the movement were highlighted almost to discredit the women and definitely obfuscate the primary reasons why they taught for the law (I can always remember feeling like the law was stupid and dismissed it as a historical clusterfuck because of how I was convinced to perceive it bolstered by my biases against religion).
The temperance movement and Prohibition was always taught to seem like a woman’s failure, like it was stupid. The male quasi-polymaths in my classes that we all trusted also didn’t help make the movement seem anything interesting or worth delving into.
I put too much faith in our abysmally shitty education system.
The temperance society was the conservative wing of the sufferage movment. they were racist southern white ladies who didnt want figures like Ida B Wells to be as visible as they were. The marginalised women like Mathilda Joslyn Gage who advocated for a systemic analysis of the oppression of women and for the rights of sex workers.
Men didnt abuse their wives because they were drunk and making substances like alcahol illegal only makes things worse. Moonshine is all thats widely available when you make legit alcahol illegal!
There were women who were advocating for economic indipendance and sti privention! The actual causes of these women’s problems!
In the US? The womens movment had its roots in the abolision movment, the temperance movment popped up quite a while afterwards once it was safer and less scandalous with rhetoric about the purity of women and how they needed to vote for the good interest of their husbands and sons. Lets not venerate the old timey swerfs, ok?
It was a mixture of both, sometimes within the same group or even the same person.
There were good reasons behind anti-alcohol advocacy and bad. The banning of sex work…I mean, there were elements of STD prevention and avoiding human trafficking I guess, but really more of that was tied to ideas about ~Christian female modesty~ and not letting the menfolk be “corrupted,” and not coming from any kind of logical place. To say nothing of how former sex workers were sometimes treated by the people they went to for aid, shut up in “improving” workhouses stricter than cloisters. SWERFy to say the least. And the above commenter says, these groups didn’t often make attempts to address the real root causes of alcohol abuse and problems in the sex industry. As for working women- yes and no. Some were. Most were middle to upper class white women who may or may not have actually taken the time to talk to the working ladies they claimed to represent (I mean some had; don’t get me wrong. just not all).
Basically, like many things in history, it’s not as simple as good or bad. There are a lot of nuances, and it really varies from case to case.
(And the racist ones definitely weren’t all southern. Not by a long chalk. A minor point, but an important one given how often I still see northern white people hide behind the idea that racism is just a southern thing.)
female awesome meme: [1/10] characters with the best character growth
The spell was broken. My uncle learned to laugh, and I learned to cry. The secret garden is always open now. Open, and awake, and alive.
— Mary Lennox
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