USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Women were especially influential. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873, was one of the leading advocates of prohibition.

Detailed explanation-2: -The only woman who voted for the 18th Amendment was Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the country’s first-and at that time, only-congresswoman. In 1918, hers was but one of the bipartisan supermajority of 282 yeas (to 128 nays) in the House that passed the prohibition amendment.

Detailed explanation-3: -The movement to prohibit alcoholic beverages had been underway for a century, led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League.

Detailed explanation-4: -In 1853, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women’s State Temperance Society in upstate New York. Stanton would even refer to alcohol as “the unclean thing.” It became clear to them that giving women the right to vote was only way they could ban alcohol.

Detailed explanation-5: -Yet the people who led this march-and indeed much of the movement to repeal the 18th Amendment-were not men in ties and long coats. They were some of the very same women who had supported Prohibition in the first place-and who had won the right to vote the same year it was enacted.