‘Liberated Spirits’ Review: When Alcohol Was a Women’s Issue
The first social issue to drive women into politics en masse was not suffrage but Prohibition.
By Elizabeth Winkler
October 25, 2018
In America it might be said, with truth as well as humor, that the birth of political consciousness is marked by the rejection of certain offensive beverages. The Sons of Liberty signaled their rebellion against King George by dumping tea into Boston Harbor. A century and a half later, the suffragettes tried to throw off another oppressor—the American man himself—by banning alcohol. In the current era of female protest and mobilization, it is easy to forget that the thing that first brought American women into politics en masse, that united and ignited them as a force with which Washington had to reckon, was Prohibition.
That liquor could be an issue around which a political class might form now seems quaint. But in a time when marital rape was not yet criminalized and women had little hope of securing financial independence to leave an alcoholic husband, cutting off men’s supply of booze seemed a sound solution. Prohibition was protection against domestic abuse, a promise that sons would not slide into debauchery and the family income would not be wasted at the saloon. It was, in the public view, a “women’s issue.”
“Liberated Spirits,” a book by the late Hugh Ambrose completed by research historian John Schuttler, shows how Prohibition—its enforcement and, later, its repeal—defined women’s first decade of formal political participation. The 18th Amendment in 1919, banning the sale of beer, wine and spirits, and the 19th Amendment in 1920, giving women the vote, went together, twin reforms ushering in a radical experiment in American society. Ambrose cleverly recasts that experiment through the lives of two women on opposite sides of the Prohibition divide: Mabel Walker Willebrandt (1889-1963), the U.S. Assistant Attorney General charged with enforcing Prohibition who, over eight years and under three presidents, brought down criminal gangs that had seized control of the country’s alcohol supply, and Pauline Sabin (1887-1955), a New York socialite and Republican political operative who, troubled by the fall-outs of Prohibition, organized women in a movement to bring about its repeal. “Prohibition’s success or failure would be measured in the public’s consciousness, often, by the success or failure of these two women,” he writes.
Willebrandt arrived in Washington in 1921 from Los Angeles, where she had served in the public defender’s office, advocating for beaten wives and fallen women. Separated from her husband but unable to divorce him, she dedicated herself to her career. “I am in my life and profession a man,” she reflected. With her political appointment, she became the highest-ranking woman in the federal government, overseeing men who had never known a female boss.
Sabin, a wealthy divorcée, served as president of the Women’s National Republican Club, raising funds and recruiting thousands of women into the party. In 1923, she was selected as New York’s first female representative on the Republican National Committee. While many men continued to insist that women’s desire for suffrage was just a fad, fleeting as the latest fashion, Sabin saw that women were “seriously interested” in politics. They would become, she forecast, “a determining factor in every election.”
In Prohibition’s early days, Willebrandt and Sabin both believed in the 18th Amendment’s potential to bring about a more perfect union. The realities of enforcement, however, drove them to take different views. Willebrandt’s appointment was a nod to women’s role in enacting Prohibition, but on arriving at the Justice Department she found that her efforts were hamstrung. She had no control over Prohibition agents or budget appropriations. Her superiors ignored her recommendations and her subordinates disregarded her orders. As she would write in a series of exposés upon leaving office, corruption and incompetence in government made the new law impossible to enforce. Agents, she remarked to the Saturday Evening Post, were “as devoid of honesty and integrity as the bootlegging fraternity.”
The result was that organized crime intensified. Gangs bribed police, prosecutors, and judges. Politicians voted dry but drank liberally. Deaths from alcohol increased, as did drinking among teens drawn to the outlaw glamour that Prohibition created. Rather than elevating American life, Prohibition had degraded it, eroding respect for the law and for the Constitution itself. Sabin worried not only about the moral consequences—that hypocrisy was “rapidly becoming our national characteristic”—but also about the effect on civil liberties. Enforcement efforts fed government spying—the tapping of telephone wires, search without warrant. The problem was an economic one, too. The government was hemorrhaging money in its attempts to enforce Prohibition and losing tax revenue from alcohol sales. Once the Great Depression hit, that would become untenable.
Sabin resigned from the Republican National Committee in protest. But Willebrandt continued to support the party platform, campaigning so aggressively for Herbert Hoover in 1928 that the press declared, “No other woman has ever had so much influence upon a presidential campaign.” She believed Prohibition could succeed if she was given the proper tools. But though she helped deliver Hoover the White House, he treated her with no less condescension than his predecessors, passing her over for Attorney General, a position she richly deserved. In the nearly 80 cases she argued before the Supreme Court, she established permissible methods of search and seizure that still hold force today and developed the idea of nailing crime bosses for tax evasion, which led to the prosecution of Al Capone. “If Mabel had worn trousers, she could have been president,” said John Sirica, a judge who later presided over Watergate. She resigned from government in 1929, only 40 years old.
Sabin spearheaded repeal. Frustrated by the claim of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which had led Prohibition, to represent all women, she founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, growing it into the largest repeal organization in the country, triple the size of the WCTU. Women, she showed politicians, did not all think and vote alike.
Hoover lost his 1932 re-election bid to Franklin Roosevelt, and on April 7, 1933, a brewery truck delivered two cases of beer to the White House. Repeal had won, but one wonders if things might have turned out differently if the sexism of government had not hampered Willebrandt from seeing Prohibition through. Ambrose’s story brings to the fore how much has changed for women in politics but also, more startlingly, how little. “It takes lots longer for a woman to get to the same place so far as good results for public office is concerned than it does a man,” Willebrandt wrote. As America approaches the centenary of women’s suffrage, “Liberated Spirits” offers an important, timely look at an era that is usually remembered for its speakeasies and flappers, rum runners and alcoholic writers. Behind all of that was the burgeoning politics of American women, determined to remake the country that had forgotten them.