I do not know if this was just a pithy response, but responses like this pissed me off so much I thought I was going to start spitting blood when this Reddit thread first came around a few years back, and every time this issue comes back. I tried to go to sleep. But this kept running through my head, so here we are.
And this is addressed to all the redditors with the hot take that these women were, indeed, just fun-hating, jealous prudes:
You really have no theory of mind when it comes to women. You think they are just reactionary, shrieking, brainless, pearl-clutching harpies who hate fun and are only ~jealous~ of their husbands going to prostitutes. Marital rape was an oxymoron and the husband was within his legal and physical bounds to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, to his wife and children. The women had no rights to property, to keep their own wages, to hold a bank account, and there were few jobs for women other than domestic and prostitute. Schoolteachers and nurses, aside from requiring education working class women could not access, were paid a pittance, and in the former case were required to be unmarried in many places. So the husband was well within his rights to drink his family wages and leave his wife and children to starve in a slum tenement, and beat them when they complained. Divorce was no practical option, especially with children. The entire economic system was, and always was, set up so that women could not survive on their own, to force them into providing sexual access and domestic labor to men in exchange for sustenance.
This was the era before antibiotics. Condoms were of poor quality and rarely used. (As if they could force their men to wear them in the first place; it would be a dreadful inconvenience for their poor dicks.) There was no cure for STDs like syphilis. These STDs were not only ultimately fatal, in many cases, but caused untold misery the whole way, and birth defects. And who is caring for the disabled child on top of her other children? The woman. (Oh, and banish the thought of a safe abortion, or a way for the woman to control her fertility. She was constantly bred because the husband either wanted those children or wanted sex and there was no effective birth control.) The husband would carry STDs from the whorehouses and give them to their wives. Stopping their husbands from frequenting prostitutes was not merely an issue of jealousy—it was a matter of existential survival for these women. Or a way of preventing themselves from becoming penniless widows. And they knew that most of the prostitutes were not ~independent working women~ in that era but exploited women, the worst thing you could become. What awaited you if you stepped out of line. They thought making prostitution illegal would liberate these poor creatures.
What were women to do? Speak about their sovereign rights? To speak plainly about the remedies—economic sovereignty, sexual freedom, the right to divorce and custody and education and standing—would get them laughed at by men already pissed they had just gotten the vote. So they had to focus on proximate causes: get rid of the alcohol, get rid of the whorehouses. A paltry, palliative measure, but what else could they do? They had to dress their concerns in the raiment of religion, one of the few acceptable fields women were allowed. Women were tasked the stabilizing force in society, the ones to marry off unstable, angry young men, absorb their violence, ‘settle’ them and force them to work a job, and produce the next generation of labor. And with that came their tasking to be the civilizing force, at that time inextricable with Christian morality. But there was a material reason behind their proselytizing—there always is, if you look closely enough, behind *anybody’s*. Sure, there were holy-roller true believers, but I bet the majority of women (and I must so bet, as history has seen to it their voices are lost) just wanted the beatings to end and food on the table, and relative safety from debilitating disease. I bet this because I see women as rational agents. Humans in an impossible situation, with no voice, living with their captors.
The factory jobs available to men were miserable, back-breaking labor, and hardly paid. This was the tail end of the era of radical labor rights movements, but there was a lot of misery, and those movements were eventually shut down, especially with the economic desperation of the depression. As it leads to drug use now in desperate, hollowed-out, post-industrial communities, so it led to drinking then. And disenfranchised groups have always found a group even lower on the social ladder than themselves to take out their anger. Women were always the punching bag and social safety valve. And a drunk, drugged population is not in much position to organize politically. There were few diversions – no television, no sports games, no entertainments – to mollify the working classes after their drudgery, so the bar was an incredibly attractive option. Oblivion was preferable to going back to the slums with screaming children underfoot in a filthy, tiny shack and a pissed off wife. Her anger may have been justified, but in the guy’s mind, she was just the shrew waiting to make his day worse. And, to those guys with a shred of decency, there was the shame in being reminded of how poorly his wages kept his family, how desperate and pointless the struggle, how they were running to stay in the same desperate place with no hope of advancement. Ashamed, depressed men lash out, even against those who they feel they have wronged.
The dispossessed men take it out on their women. This always, always, always happens.
Prohibition did not work. We know that now, with the power of hindsight. And the social fabric is utterly different, now: while women are by no means liberated, they can hold property, they can keep their own wages and assets, they have rights to their children, they can obtain education and jobs. Divorce from an alcoholic husband without landing in the gutter is a possibility. But to advance the narrative that prohibition was started by a bunch of fuddy-duddy no-fun busy-bodies who hated the idea of anybody having a good time is monstrous and shows only your contempt for women. You cannot know the fear and desperation of being trapped with a violent, alcoholic husband, several children, pregnant every year from marriage to menopause, and listening to your children crying with hunger while waiting for your husband to come back from the bar. And then you must approach him and ask for money. And you have nowhere to run. I wager you have never had to bury your own children dead of starvation and the diseases of poverty. There was nowhere for them to turn without you - orphanages a joke, these masses of children from these women who had no power to control their own fertility seen as labor at best and excess humanity, vermin, by most of society. And their alcoholic father would leave them to die while he drinks himself to death. So it’s you or nobody.
What do you do? The possibilities on the outside for you, a fallen, divorced women, would be prostitution or penury. But you have one bit of power, now - you can vote. And women as a class share your interests. You would be shut down campaigning for full human rights, but if you dress your concerns up in religion, there is a chance.
Of course, a hundred years in the future, men will use this as an example of how as soon as women are able to vote, they ruin everything.
Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women is a brilliant and deeply-researched work on the phenomenon of the religious, conservative woman, and addresses why women are often the enforcers and lieutenants of religious morality and social conservatism, when it benefits them least. It is not because they are small-minded cunts with small spirits, any more than men on the average. There is a material and strategic reason, and the temperance movement is a perfect example of this. They are making a bargain within the confines of the tiny shred of power they are given.
And ask, always, before you condemn a group of women as a bunch of no-fun brainless shrieking reactionaries because they want to take away your toys: what material, rational reason might here be? Give them at least the dignity of being considered rational agents before you condemn.
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