"A Brief History of Women in Bars: A Minnesota Story in Three Rounds" Audio Documentary Out Now!
2020 marks the 100th anniversary of both the start of Prohibition and women’s suffrage (which, in practice, extended primarily to white women). The rapid succession of these two constitutional amendments wasn’t a coincidence. In 2020, I was awarded a Minnesota Historical Society Legacy Research Fellowship to research, write, and produce an audio documentary about how the temperance movement paved the way for the women’s suffrage movement in Minnesota, But, like any good historical pursuit, the story got way more complicated as I did more research.
My new 45-minute audio documentary, “A Brief History of Women in Bars: A Minnesota Story in Three Rounds”—which has been run on Minnesota Public Radio and KFAI-FM—uses the stories of women of 100 years ago to show how Minnesota’s temperance movement set the stage for our women’s suffrage movement. But it also shows how temperance leaders—and, by proxy, many early suffragists—largely failed to engage women who were not wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Many of the Minnesota women who were excluded from early temperance and suffrage movements empowered themselves in other ways, including through the economic and social opportunities presented by the alcohol industry. The stories of these individuals help us understand how Minnesota women of 100+ years ago found empowerment—sometimes in spite of alcohol, and sometimes because of it.
Women protest outside an 1873 saloon in Anoka, Minnesota, while the bar owner’s wife prepares to pour a pot of water on them from above. Image found in the mid-century book “A Brief History of the Minnesota Women’s Christian Temperance Union.” More about this picture in the documentary!
Big, big thanks to KFAI’s MinneCulture and the Minnesota Historical Society for supporting this documentary.