- Page 217 →Alcohol consumption in Colonial through 19th century America was prodigious and almost universal. Whiskey was often on the breakfast table. Frontier people thought water unsafe and drank hard cider all day. Drinking among women and children became more secretive and/or diminished when the saloon gradually replaced home as the center of social drinking. Such mostly masculine events as the Gold Rush and the Civil War intensified the trend. Virtually all men—including clergy—drank heavily. Pay envelopes went straight to the barkeep: family violence and desperate lack of funds grew epidemic in the working classes. (It was more subtle among the rich.) Early temperance societies were all male, and later male led. Women formed their first large action-oriented, anti-saloon groups in Ohio in 1873, singing and praying loudly in the streets and taverns. Lucy Thurman, a president of the National Association of Colored Women, entered temperance work in 1875. Carry Nation (1846-1911) is credited as the first to add a hatchet to evangelical methods, smashing bars, barrels, and bottles from 1899-ca. 1910. The greatest anti-drink force was the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), led at its height by Frances Willard (1839-98). Women's efforts were essential in securing Prohibition (1919); but once we got the ballot (1920), we voted heavily for Repeal (1932).
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