Today I want to introduce you to a woman, who once you have heard of, you are likely never to forget. A woman who, in her 50s, filled her pockets full of rocks, wielded a hatchet, and went around to bars and saloons smashing windows and causing as much damage as she possibly could. She vehemently opposed the sale and consumption of alcohol and she called herself Carry A Nation.
Carrie was born Caroline Amelia Moore in Kentucky in 1846. When she was 21, she married a young doctor who had served as a medic in the American Civil War. This would have been a deeply traumatic experience for him, amputating many a limb and seeing a lot of death. As such, in an age before the recognition of PTSD, he self-medicated with alcohol and hence became an alcoholic. When Carrie became pregnant with his daughter, out of a sense of protection of both herself and her unborn baby, her parents encouraged her to leave him and she left him and moved back in with her parents. However, within less than a year, he had died from the effects of alcoholism. So here was Carrie, a single mum with no financial support in 1868. Being a single mum would have been quite taboo at the time. No wonder she began to dislike alcohol.
At this time in America, there was something called the Temperance Movement. This was a protest movement that began in Protestant churches to try and stop people from drinking alcohol. The movement had been going on for several decades, but it had begun to get a little more radical around this time. More and more temperance organisations were popping up, including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League.
After her husband’s death, in order to support herself and her child, Carrie sold a small piece of land that her dad had given her and also sold her husband’s medical textbooks and medical equipment. With this money, she bought a small house and trained to become a teacher. Unfortunately, after a few years teaching, there were complaints about the way that she was teaching the pronunciation of some words and Carrie lost her job.
In 1876, she married her second husband, who was 19 years older than she was, and who was a preacher and a lawyer. Carrie did not particularly respect her second husband as she believed him to be somewhat hypocritical and not devoutly Christian enough for someone who claimed to be a preacher.
Carrie wanted change in society, especially in regards to the drinking of alcohol, which she increasingly believed to be the root of many of society’s problems. Especially for women who had very few rights and opportunities and were often dependent on their husband for survival. Particularly if the husband spent all of the family income on alcohol or became violent and abusive while under the influence. Drinking alcohol was pretty rampant among the working class, to the point where some factory owners were bringing in rules about not drinking at work. That seems like a sensible workplace health and safety rule.
Saloons, which were the bars of the day, were a female free zone, and they were incredibly popular among men. But it was not the clientele that Carrie was against; it was the corrupt and hypocritical owners and liquor sellers that she believed were a scourge on society.
Carrie lived in Kentucky, which was a state that had already banned the sale of alcohol, but there were many illegal saloons that still sold alcohol. Selling alcohol would have been a very lucrative business and the politicians and local authorities were happy to turn a blind eye, because it was probably someone they knew who was profiting from this illegal sale of alcohol. In one case a police officer’s brother was the operator of an illegal Saloon.
As a devout Christian woman, Carrie did a lot of community work. She started a sewing circle to provide clothing to women and children who had been impacted by alcoholic husbands. She also visited a local jail to counsel the inmates who were serving time. Here, she discovered the reason that many of the prisoners were in jail was because of crimes related to alcohol and alcoholism. Carrie knew she that had to try to make a societal change.
Carrie did everything in her very limited power, as a woman without a vote, to try and stop the illegal alcohol operations. She wrote letters and more letters and petitioned local politicians to crack down on these illegal bars. She held meetings and wrote more letters. She even turned up to bars and sang hymns to try and convince patrons to turn away from the evil device of alcohol. But nobody was listening to this lowly woman either to her hymnal singing nor her endless letters and petitioning, so she decided to change tactics. She and some other women in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union decided to go the pharmacy, where they sold whiskey by the barrel and smash up the whiskey. This gave her a taste for the game of smashing things up.
Carrie believed she got a message from God. One day she filled her pocket with bricks wrapped in paper and visited an illegal bar and proceeded to “hurl bricks and stones at the whiskey bottles, glass mugs and tumblers, and the giant mirror behind the bar. The men—confused and terrified—huddled in the corner. When she ran out of her own projectiles, she grabbed pool balls and billiard cues to smash up the room.” These smashings were quite effective and people were scared that she may visit their bars. She would walk into a saloon and exclaim to the bar keeper, “Good morning, destroyer of men’s souls” before smashing up their bar. She gained quite a following and she was often joined by others on her saloon smashing missions.
Her second husband, whose name was David Nation, which is where she got her name Carrie Nation, was not at all supportive of her tactics, and apparently made an offhand remark that she would be able to do more damage with a hatchet. This, she thought, was the most sensible suggestion he had ever made, and she got herself a hatchet, which is like a tiny little axe, and took her bar smashing to the next level. She even invented a word for this, she called them “Hatchetations”. Her husband, now even more unimpressed, filed for divorce.
Carrie- with an i.e., was now single again as a woman in her 50s and she needed to support herself. She did an incredible job at branding and changed the spelling of her name to C-A-R-R-Y and called herself Carry A Nation, because she felt she was trying to carry the nation out of the evils of alcohol abuse and addiction. The way that she would support herself financially was to sell mini hatchet brooches. She would even take a suitcase and fill it up with the smashed up remains of the saloons and then sell these as souvenirs. She would publish newsletters and go on speaking tours to lecture about the impact that alcoholism had on peoples’ lives and the hypocrisy of the people who were selling the alcohol. She even wrote her own autobiography. But she did not just keep all of the profits from her merchandise, she put every spare cent into creating a home for women and children who were victims of alcoholic men. Kind of the equivalent to a women’s shelter today.
Carry’s “Hatchetations” were not exactly well received by the authorities and she was arrested over 30 times. Once, she was arrested 4 times in one day. Another time, she went to jail for three weeks and was forced to sleep without a pillow on the concrete floor. But she did not remain unscathed from her “hatchetations”. Although men were bound by the rules of society to not hit an older woman, the women associated with the saloons often attacked her and severely beat her.
Carry was often dismissed as a “demented woman,” or “psychotic from an early age,” but the fact is that her methods were surprisingly effective at closing many saloons and bringing awareness to the plight of women who suffered the effects of their husband’s alcoholism. In fact, when she toured the UK in 1908-9, the British people were often shocked that she was not the violent and “crazy” woman as portrayed by the newspapers. Instead, they remarked that she had “remarkable wit,” a “good sense of humour,” with a “wise, general outlook upon life, a kindly, even modest, and unassuming manner,” with “the light of a visionary in her eyes.”
Carrie did not live to see the official introduction of prohibition in America. She died in 1911 and the 18th Amendment, that introduced prohibition, was made in 1918. Of course, this law created a host of issues in itself, but that is a story for another day.