Christen McCurdy at Bitch Magazine kicks off a multi-part series on “Ladies and Liquor” with a history of the Women’s Suffrage movement and its collaboration with Prohibition:
It wasn’t until the late 1960s that “the personal is political” became a feminist rallying cry, but the suffragists-cum-Prohibitionists and the Prohibitionists-cum-suffragists of the 19th century were already making an explicit connection between the two. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union – the leading temperance organization for most of the 19th century – advocated for women’s suffrage on the grounds of what she called “home protection”: if women had a voice in the way states controlled liquor, WCTU President Frances Willard argued, they’d be in a better position to keep their homes and families dry.