The Women Who Kept America Drinking During Prohibition
- Daniel Holland
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
It began quietly, almost domestically. A copper still hidden behind a wash boiler. Bottles cooling beneath a kitchen table. Children sent outside while their mother finished a batch. When the United States outlawed alcohol in the early twentieth century, it did not only create gangsters and gunfights. It also pulled thousands of women into a shadow economy that ran through homes, churches, farms, boarding houses and back rooms across the country.
The passage of the 18th Amendment in 1920 made the production, transport and sale of alcohol illegal throughout the United States. Drinking itself remained lawful, at least on paper, but that distinction mattered little once legal supplies vanished. Americans who had not stockpiled liquor before the ban found themselves abruptly cut off. Demand did not disappear. It intensified.
Into that gap stepped bootleggers. Some were organised criminals. Many were not. Across cities and rural communities alike, ordinary citizens began brewing beer, fermenting wine and distilling spirits at home. The quality ranged from carefully made whiskey to dangerously toxic moonshine. Smuggled liquor from Canada, the Caribbean and Europe commanded even higher prices.
What is often forgotten is who did much of this work. While popular culture later centred on male gangsters such as Al Capone, historians now believe women made up the majority of bootleggers during Prohibition. They brewed, transported, sold and in many cases organised entire operations.
As historian Mary Murphy observed, women involved in illicit liquor were “breaking both custom and the law”. They were also responding to economic necessity.
Women at the Heart of Bootlegging
Contemporary newspapers and court records suggest that for every man involved in selling illegal alcohol, there may have been as many as five women. The imbalance was not accidental. Women were embedded in domestic life, trusted by neighbours, overlooked by authorities and already skilled in food preparation. Brewing and fermenting were extensions of household labour.
Many female bootleggers were working class mothers, often widowed or divorced. In cities such as New Orleans, those arrested were frequently in their thirties, from Irish, Italian, Jewish or Spanish backgrounds, and living in tightly knit neighbourhoods. Bootlegging offered income without abandoning childcare. It could be done from home, quietly, and at scale.
Records remain fragmentary. Most bootleggers were never caught. Those who were often left few traces beyond brief newspaper notices. It is therefore difficult to know how many women worked independently and how many were tied to organised crime. What is clear is that women were present at every level of the trade, from kitchen stills to international smuggling networks.
The Women Who Helped Create Prohibition
The irony runs deeper. Women were not merely participants in Prohibition’s underground economy. They were central to its creation. The temperance movement was driven largely by women alarmed by alcoholism, domestic violence and household poverty. Organisations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union framed alcohol as a threat to family survival.
Prominent campaigners for women’s rights, including Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, supported temperance alongside suffrage. Their influence frightened the liquor industry, which actively opposed women gaining the vote.
Yet Prohibition unfolded differently from its advocates’ hopes. Speakeasies were unregulated. Underage drinking increased. Organised crime flourished. In some communities, women drank more than before, not less. By the late 1920s, many of the same women who had pushed for Prohibition began to support repeal. Once again, their political pressure proved decisive.
Naming the Women Bootleggers
Language reflected unease with women’s criminality. Newspapers experimented with terms such as “bootleggerette” and “bootleggeress”, none of which endured. Among flappers, slang flourished. A female bootlegger might be called a “snake charmer”.
Those who became wealthy acquired nicknames equal to their male counterparts. “Moonshine Mary”. “Queen of the Night Clubs”. “The Henhouse Bootlegger”. These titles carried admiration and unease in equal measure.
A First Crime for Many
Some women had long worked in legitimate alcohol businesses before 1920, including distilleries in Ireland, Scotland and the United States. When Prohibition threatened their livelihoods, many continued supplying American buyers illegally.
For others, bootlegging marked their first brush with crime. Domestic brewing skills became commercial assets. Home stills could be dangerous. Explosions were not uncommon. Poorly distilled moonshine could blind or kill. The risks were real, but so were the rewards.
Drinking, Gender and the Speakeasy
Before Prohibition, drinking was largely male and public. Saloons excluded women. In small towns, a woman seen drinking risked social ostracism or arrest. Prohibition reshaped that landscape. Speakeasies and nightclubs ignored gender norms. Women drank openly, danced publicly and socialised beyond domestic confines.
Many of these venues were run by women or couples. Once the law was already broken, few proprietors worried about serving women. Prohibition unintentionally expanded female public drinking more than any reform movement had achieved.
Women and Organised Crime
As the illegal liquor trade grew, gangs consolidated power. Alcohol became enormously profitable. Violence followed. Women were valuable assets. Authorities were reluctant to search them. Some male agents were legally barred from frisking women.
Smuggling techniques exploited social assumptions. Liquor hidden beneath skirts was known as “girdle whiskey”. Some women dressed as nuns. Others simply relied on outrage. One federal agent reported in 1924 that a suspected bootlegger “defiantly declared to bring suit against anyone who touched her”.
Women were also hired simply to sit in passenger seats, discouraging searches. Their presence reduced risk and increased profits.
Leniency and Its Limits
Women were often treated leniently when caught. Judges hesitated to jail mothers. J Carroll Cate, head of a federal unit in Tennessee, admitted turning widows loose because their children would otherwise go hungry.
Sentences were lighter. Fines were modest. Some women served weeks rather than years. One bootlegger earned the equivalent of nearly half a million dollars a year and paid a fine of less than five thousand.
In certain states police officers weren't allowed to search women so the women bootleggers would hide flasks, even cases, on their persons and taunt male police officers.
“A painted-up doll was sitting in a corner . . . . She had her arms folded and at our command she stood up. But then came the rub. She laughed at us . . . then defiantly declared to bring suit against anyone who touched her,” an unnamed Ohio “Dry Agent” told the Hamilton Evening Journal in 1924.
The alcohol smuggling syndicates took advantage of these legal loopholes, recruiting women into their ranks. Even if the gangs didn’t hire women bootleggers, they hired them for ride-alongs to reduce searches and robberies. “No self-respecting federal agent likes to hold up an automobile containing women,” according to the Boston Daily Globe. The government feared women bootleggers outnumbered men five to one. And frankly, bootlegging was good money with little punishment. In 1925, a Milwaukee woman admitted to earning $30,000 a year bootlegging. She was caught and fined $200 with a month’s sentence to jail, netting $29,800 for the year. Denver’s Esther Matson, 22, was sentenced to church every Sunday for two years after her bootlegging trial in 1930. Even President Warren G. Harding pardoned a Michigan woman bootlegger, and Ohio governor Vic Donahey commuted a woman’s sentence to five days.
Repeat offenders faced harsher scrutiny. Claims of poverty were investigated. Leniency diminished. Violence also loomed. Notorious bootlegger Bessie Perri was shot outside her home in 1930. Her murder remains unsolved.
By the mid 1920s, it was increasingly clear that Prohibition had created a shadow economy that mirrored the inequalities of the legal one. As Bootlegging Mothers and Drinking Daughters makes clear, the illegal liquor trade offered rare access to steady income for groups routinely excluded from formal business ownership. Women benefited disproportionately. So too did Black Americans, particularly in rural areas and segregated towns where legitimate economic opportunities were sharply limited.
This reality existed alongside a complicated political landscape. Many leading advocates for racial justice supported Prohibition in principle. Figures such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois viewed temperance as a strategy for reducing violence, poverty, and exploitation within Black communities.
Yet Black voters were often sceptical. In Florida, Black citizens were instrumental in defeating a 1910 attempt to ban alcohol, reflecting widespread concern that enforcement would fall hardest on them. Prohibition laws were unevenly applied, and distrust of police was already well established.
Arrest records add another layer of complexity. Relatively few Black Americans appear in bootlegging prosecutions. As The Feminine Side of Bootlegging notes, it remains unclear whether illegal alcohol production was dominated by white operators, or whether Black communities were simply less inclined to report violations, effectively shielding local bootleggers from detection. Either way, this absence points to an underground economy that functioned efficiently and quietly.
No figure illustrates this better than Birdie Brown.
Birdie Brown and the Quiet Power of the Parlour
Birdie Brown lived alone as a homesteader in rural Montana, a setting far removed from the glamour and violence of urban bootlegging. According to historian Ellen Baumler, Brown became known locally for producing moonshine that was not only strong but reliably safe. In an era when poorly distilled liquor could blind or kill, this reputation mattered.
Her home evolved into a social centre. It was part parlour, part refuge, and part informal business hub. People came to drink, but also to talk, rest, and reconnect. Brown’s operation blended seamlessly into the rhythms of frontier life. There were no gunmen, no bribes, no headlines. Her authority came from trust.
Brown was later described as one of the many “Queens of the Bootleggers”, a title that newspapers applied loosely but revealingly. In her case, it reflected stability rather than spectacle. She demonstrated how Prohibition could be navigated through discretion, community ties, and technical skill.
Her legacy has endured in unexpected ways. As reported by Forbes, the modern Black women owned spirits company Saint Liberty Whiskey has honoured Birdie Brown with a bourbon named Bertie’s Bear Gulch. The tribute reframes Brown not as a criminal footnote, but as an early Black woman entrepreneur operating under extraordinary constraints.
If Birdie Brown represents one end of the bootlegging spectrum, Gertrude Lythgoe represents the other.
Cleo Lythgoe and the Business of Scale
Gertrude “Cleo” Lythgoe had no interest in blending in. Before Prohibition, she was a legal liquor wholesaler. When her business was criminalised, she simply relocated operations to the Bahamas and continued trading on a far larger scale.
As detailed by Fred Minnick, Cleo commissioned her own boats, negotiated directly with Scottish distilleries, and supplied high quality Scotch to American buyers who were willing to pay a premium. Her enterprise was vast, organised, and unapologetic.
Federal authorities targeted her aggressively. On one occasion, they deployed a female agent to strip search her upon re entering the United States. Cleo treated the incident as an inconvenience rather than a warning. She gave interviews to the press, travelled armed, and attracted both competitors and admirers in equal measure.
Love letters poured in. Marriage proposals followed. Several men offered to support her financially if she would abandon bootlegging. She refused them all.
When one of her ships was finally seized, it appeared that Cleo’s luck had run out. Instead, she testified that her employees had stolen the vessel and smuggled liquor without her knowledge. The explanation held. Her operation collapsed, but she avoided prison. By that point, she had already amassed a fortune estimated at the modern equivalent of more than fifteen million dollars.
Cleo’s success complicates the idea that women thrived in bootlegging only because they were underestimated. She thrived because she understood logistics, markets, and risk better than most of her male rivals.
The Limits of Leniency
Not all women escaped consequences. In 1923, Polish immigrant “Moonshine Mary” Wazeniak became the first woman sentenced under Illinois law for selling poisoned liquor. Operating from her La Grange Park home, which she had converted into a speakeasy, Wazeniak served moonshine that killed a customer. She was sentenced to one year to life, a reminder that informal production carried lethal risks.
Josephine Doody, known as the Bootleg Lady of Glacier Park, occupied an ambiguous space between outlaw and survivor. After killing a man in a dance hall, reportedly in self defence, she fled federal agents and hid in McCarthyville, Montana. She was forcibly returned by Dan Doody, an early park ranger, and taken to a remote cabin on the Middle Fork Flathead River.
There, Josephine overcame an opium addiction and eventually married Dan. She continued ferrying moonshine across rivers and supplying railway workers in the wilderness. Her story reflects the precarious balance women bootleggers maintained between independence and vulnerability.
What the Queens Reveal
By the time Prohibition ended, women like Birdie Brown and Cleo Lythgoe had demonstrated that the illegal liquor trade was not simply a masculine underworld of guns and gangs. It was also sustained by kitchens, parlours, ledgers, and logistics.
Some women survived through discretion and community trust. Others through scale, publicity, and audacity. Together, they reveal Prohibition not as a moral failure alone, but as a moment when women briefly occupied economic spaces they had long been denied.
When repeal came, most returned quietly to ordinary life. Their stories faded. But for a decade, they kept America drinking, one bottle at a time.
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