Why did women institute alcohol prohibition (18th Amendment)?

Question

right after they got the right to vote? Seriously why are women like this? I like to drink and enjoy myself sometimes, is that really such a crime?

Answer 1

Not all women were for it. It was the Bible beaters that pushed for the ban of alcohol.

Answer 2

Actually, it was men who passed the prohibition bill. Women got the vote immediately after (19th Amendment).

This demonstrates the power of women's ability to nag men into doing their bidding.

Answer 3

Prohibition actually became law before American women got the right to vote across the USA.  The 18th amendment gave America prohibition, the 19th amendment gave women the vote (though women were already voting in some states before the 19th amendment was passed).

The Temperence movement was huge in the USA in the late 19th century, far more women were interested in prohibition than in the right to vote. They believed strongly that alcahol was the reason there was so much poverty, and domestic violence.  In 'america's Women' Gail Collins writes:

'Temperence advocates could be mind-bogglingly self-righteous, and they tended to blame alcahol for everything bad except the weather. (Frances Perkins, who would be secretary of labor in Franklin Roosevelt's administration, recalled that as a student at Mt. Holyoke, she visited a poor mill town and was stunned that some of the impoverished residents didn't drink.  It had never occured to her that anything but alcahol caused poverty.)  Nevertheless, they were talking about a genuine social issue that ruined the lives of a great many American women.  A drunken husband was an emotional burden, a potential physical danger, and a drain on the family finances. With little control over her property or her children's custody, a woman who had the bad luck to pick a husband with an alcahol problem could do little but watch and worry - unless she came to the end of her rope and grabbed a hatched and marched to the nearest saloon.

The Women's Christian Temperence Union became the biggest mass political organization of American womn in history.  In the 1890s, ten times as many New York women were in the WCTU as in all the suffrage groups combined.  Tampa alone had three different women's temperence organizations (one for blacks, one for whites, and one for Cuban Americans), but Florida's suffrage group had only twenty members in the whole state, eight of them men.  However, all those temperence women gradually began to feel that having the vote would be a very good thing because it held the key to the prohibition of liquor.  They became grassroots soldiers for the suffrage movement, organizing all those petition drives and referenda campaigns and state lobbying efforts that kept the effort going during the doldrums and gradually pushed it forward to success.'

The liquor industry was vehemently opposed to women's suffrage because it feared that it would lead to prohibition.  In the even, though, prohibition came before the vote for women.

Answer 4

You are confused.  The women who organized for the right to vote were OPPOSED by conservative "traditonal" women's organizations such as the  Women's Christian Temperance Union which spearheaded the temperance movement in the U.S.  Today, the same "conservative" type of "lady" backs Phylis Schafaly / Ann Coulter for-profit ideologues and the ultra conservative Christian so-called Pro-Family organization, the Eagle Forum which struggles just as stupidly now to impose it's Christian-based notions or "morality" on the rest of us did as the same flavor of "proper lady" who struggled for the temperance movement.  See Dominionism, which describes, "in several distinct ways, a tendency among some conservative politically-active Christians to seek influence or control over secular civil government through political action — aiming either at a nation governed by Christians or a nation governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law." (wiki).  Feminism struggles for self-determination and rational choice.  The conservative "lady", on the other hand, fights historically and persistently to force everyone to live by HER pet set of sensibilities.

Answer 5

Because men were spending money on drink and letting the family go hungry.  Because drunken men can and do become very violent.

Honestly, this question is so easy to research (and belongs in the history section anyway).

Answer 6

Some believed it was the cause of all things bad. Even though prohibition allowed organized crime to run rampant.

Answer 7

Why were men so eager to enforce this farce law? Not to mention all the male preachers preaching against it.

Answer 8

Dunno. Why did men vote for it?

Seems like a lot of people wanted it, and a lot more didn't.

That's why Prohibition isn't US wide any more.

If it's still the case where you live, you could try working to change it.

Cheers :-)