I’m pretty sure that the temporary prohibition of alcohol in the U.S.A. would not have happened had women not been able to vote. Other drug prohibitions might also be the result of women’s suffrage, I think. I had a friend who felt that the increase in government spending on social programs was also caused by women’s newfound power in politics - women tend to be more compassionate, and want to take care of people. When men ruled they kept the government out of that kind of stuff.
Is the rise of socialism directly tied to women’s suffrage? Are there countries that set up government programs for feeding the poor and taking care of the sick before they allowed women to vote?
Well, here’s a gaping hole in your argument right off the bat. Prohibition was the 18th amendment. Women got the right to vote with the 19th amendment. Prohibition was enacted 8 months before women had the right to vote.
Don’t make the easy mistake of assuming that because two things occur at about the same time that any kind of causal relationship exists.
In addition, the Income Tax (which is certainly a means of wealth redistribution) was authorized six years before universal women’s suffrage (although women had the right to vote in several states, earlier).
Socialism was a powerful political movement (more in Europe than the U.S., but here as well), over 30 years before universal suffrage in the U.S.–which preceded universal suffrage in many European countries.
Many of Teddy Roosevelt’s programs were driven by “social justice” issues and they were carried on by Taft (tepidly) and Wilson (more enthusiastically) before universal suffrage–of which Wilson did not really approve.
Also, “welfare” was intended to support single mothers and their children in the absence of a father/breadwinner. As women have slowly gained economic and political power, this idea is given less merit, even by “compassionate” women.
The Federal Income Tax was not so much “authorized” in 1913 as **re-**authorized. We’d had Federal income taxes since 1861, but starting in 1894 they went on an unintentional 2-decade hiatus thanks to a Supreme Court case called Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan and Trust. The Pollock case established, for the first time in history, that taxes on income derived from property (e.g. rent) were equivalent to a tax on the value of the property itself, and thus were now considered “direct taxes” under the Constitution. (The Constitution requires the amount of direct tax collected to be apportioned among the States according to each State’s population. This is a very messy process which, by 1894, was totally avoided by Congress.)
To remedy this situation, in 1913 Congress passed, and the States ratified, the Sixteenth Amendment, which treated Federal income taxes as indirect taxes no matter where the income came from.
I do remember reading several years ago that liquor companies contributed heavily to anti-suffrage organizations, on the theory that if women were granted the vote, they would overwhelmingly support Prohibition. When the 18th Amendment passed prior to women getting the vote, the donations from the liquor companies dried up, as it were. (Sorry that I don’t have a cite, this was in a history of the women’s suffrage movement.)
Both male politicians and female suffragists often assumed that women would vote as a bloc, especially on issues concerning women and children. Obviously, that didn’t happen. You see women all across the political spectrum today.
As for the socialist question, while there were both famous and non-famous female socialists, I’d always gotten the impression that the big socialist thinkers/speakers/politicians were overwhelmingly male.
The women’s suffrage amendment passed 20 months after the prohibition amendment, according to my copy of the Constitution. However, do note that women already had the right to vote in some states (Wyoming was the first, IIRC) even before the 19th amendment. Thus, women did vote for state legislators in many places–and it was the state legislatures that ratified the 18th amendment. In other words, the OP’s hypothesis regarding suffrage and prohibition still stands.
The relationship between the suffrage and prohibition movements is well-documented. See, for instance, Janet Zollinger Giele’s book Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism.
I see a much greater correlation between religiosity and moralism with the prohibition of alcohol than I do with the women’s sufferage movement. Perusing this subject it would appear that the temperance movement was alive and well long before sufferage http://www.drugtext.org/reports/nc/nc2a.htm and is still kicking today. http://www.ndsn.org/SEPOCT97/PANHANDLE.html
Also, as I see it, suffragettes were not against drinking per se, but against the abusive behavior of husbands towards themselves and their children when these men drank. http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/books/TIR32_Rose.html
The above link will also show that women were instrumental in bringing about the repeal of the Volstead Act.
You are correct, mintygreen, about it being 20 months between the passage of the two amendments rather than 8. I was looking at a site which had the date for the 18th as January, 1920.
As for women having the right to vote in states, prior to 1920 that would have included less than 1/3 of the states, and in many of those there was only partial suffrage. In some states, women were given the right to vote in presidential but not in any other elections. Mathematically, this means that at best there was some suffrage in less than half the states which ratified prohibition.
I would never disagree with the fact that the suffrage and temperance movements were sometimes related. But that is far from saying that suffrage led to temperance. If anything, I think a stronger argument can be made for the reverse, since the temperance movement gave some (not all, but some) women a reason to want to vote. But I think the evidence is pretty strong that prohibition passed mostly without the affect of women voters.
tourbot and shell, you’re both correct that it was the temperance movement predated the widespread push for women’s suffrage. As Giele documents in her book, the social phenomenon of women’s temperance organizations led directly to the suffrage movement of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. But many, many women were involved in both, and the organizations fed on each other’s momentum once both movements were up and running.