ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
U.S. History 1877-Present Videos 173 videos
Have you ever told one of your siblings to stop poking you, only to have them do something like hold their hand right in front of your face instead...
John D. Rockefeller. Greasy robber baron, or philanthropic saint? Why not both? Boy, that's a weird combination...
Today we'll learn about plans to assimilate the American Indian population after reconstruction. If you've ever seen Star Trek, you'll know that fo...
U.S. History 1877-Present 5.3 The Temperance Movement 124 Views
Share It!
Description:
Besides suffrage, one of the biggest goals of the women’s movement was to get rid of alcohol. Yeah...back then, people knew how to have fun without ending the evening face-down in a ditch.
Transcript
- 00:04
Beside suffrage one of the biggest goals of the women's [Women protesting]
- 00:07
movement was getting rid of alcohol this was called the temperance movement what
- 00:13
beef did some women have with hooch well certainly people might have thought it [Woman throws beef at hooch]
- 00:16
was because the ladies were anti fun but a big factor was that alcohol was a
- 00:21
major contributor to domestic abuse women and children were being regularly
Full Transcript
- 00:25
victimized beaten or even killed by drunken husbands and fathers and a lot [Man attempts to hit woman]
- 00:30
of times and then totally got away with this is use without any consequences
- 00:34
some ask where men really get into that drunk all the time well the short answer [Man pouring alcohol into mouth]
- 00:39
is yes oh here's the long version Oh most men
- 00:43
who worked in factories received their pay each week not at work not from the
- 00:48
boss but at their local bar from the bartender yes the factory owners sent
- 00:54
the money there on purpose so that the men would spend most of their weeks pay [Boss hands money to bartender]
- 00:59
on beer and hard liquor this prevented them from saving enough money to move up
- 01:04
from factory work yeah talk about job security well here's another fun fact
- 01:08
bars also doubled as polling stations during election then would vote at the
- 01:13
bar and then get lasted for a while you know the other way around well this was [Man drinking at the bar]
- 01:18
one reason some men gave from not allowing women to vote the bars were
- 01:22
full of dangerous drunk and angry men so how could women possibly go inside and [Man screams and chases woman]
- 01:27
vote yeah there may be some flaws in that rationale bars were also set up
- 01:32
outside the gate to the factories so men stop there before they went home each
- 01:36
night while this meant that guys spent a lot of time drinking and often came home [Man drinking at the bar]
- 01:40
drunk and violent at the time if a man beat his wife or children or even killed
- 01:45
them when he was drunk he was not charged with any crime if four people [Man stood beside police officer]
- 01:51
were not making this up this is real the police would say well the man was drunk
- 01:55
he didn't know what he was doing you can't put him in jail for that right and
- 02:01
which makes us wonder if maybe the police force was drunk when they came up [Police man drinking alcohol in court]
- 02:04
with that rule well not only did many women fear for their health safety and
- 02:09
lives because of drunken then some families experienced extreme
- 02:13
poverty in part because men spent their cash on boots oh by the 1870s women that [Woman opens cabinet to I.O.U]
- 02:18
had enough they still weren't allowed to vote which was the only way to change
- 02:21
the laws that allowed drunken men to kill them without any consequences so
- 02:26
ladies went with the only really open to them to ban alcohol completely women did [Women marching to Ban Alcohol street]
- 02:32
this very cleverly by calling on the very idea of separate spheres that men
- 02:37
use to keep them powerless the innocently asked how can we fulfill our
- 02:42
god-given role as mothers and caretakers of the home if we and our children are
- 02:48
being gene and killed how can we care for our families if we have no money [Mother and son crying and father appears with bottles of beer]
- 02:52
because our husbands spend it all on alcohol she gets questioned yet if men
- 02:57
abandoned their god-given role as protectors of women and children then
- 03:00
women must act to protect society by banning alcohol well God demands that we
- 03:06
the women of America act to save our country and our own delicate female [Woman slaps a bottle of beer]
- 03:10
honor right well the women's Christian Temperance Union was founded in 1873 in
- 03:15
Ohio and chapters spread across America women did incredibly brave freedom of
- 03:20
temperance they prayed in front of bars where men assaulted them they destroyed [Women praying at a bar and man hits them with foam hammer]
- 03:25
barrels of alcohol and went to jail for it they gave public speeches they
- 03:29
marched they came forward and talked about their experiences of being beaten
- 03:32
by their drunken husband and they talked about the mothers children sisters and
- 03:37
friends they'd lost as well they weren't taken so seriously by working men but
- 03:42
the WCTU appealed to upper-class Protestant men who saw drunkenness as a
- 03:47
dirty low-class foreign Catholic kind of problem ruining manliness in America
- 03:52
while eventually the 18th amendment brought in the era of prohibition in [18th amendment appears]
- 03:55
which all alcohol was banned in the u.s. the temperance movement had ridden its
- 04:00
wave of girl power to success unfortunately for the temperate ladies [Woman surfing]
- 04:04
prohibition didn't stick and led to a heap of other problems like an explosion
- 04:08
in organized crime but hey at least we got a whole lot of [Man firing a gun]
- 04:12
great gangster movies out of it right so that's a plus [Woman watching a gangster movie]
Related Videos
Ever heard of a "living document"? They eat and breathe just like the rest of us! They even walk around on their own two legs. Okay, fine—maybe t...
If the Puritans had gotten their way, religion would play a much larger role in lawmaking these days. Want to know more? Watch the video for all th...
What happened between the creation of the Articles of Confederation and the ratification of the current U.S. Constitution? This video analyzes the...
The Modernists thought the world had a lot of problems, and they were intent on fixing them—or at least talking about fixing them. Unfortunately,...
This video explains Federalism and the quest for a fair balance between state and national power. It covers the progression and compromises of Fede...