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Women in the 1920s Facts for kids: Fast Fact Sheet
Fast, fun facts and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about the Famous Women in the 1920s.

What were the roles of Women in the 1920s?
The roles of Women in the 1920s varied considerably. The majority of women remained in the traditional role of housewife. However, the number of working women increased by 25% as a result of the work they had undertaken during WW1. Roles of 1920's women in the workplace included factory workers, secretaries, salesclerks and telephone operators. The number of women attending college rose to 10% of the population by the end of the 1920's.

Who were famous Women in the 1920s? Famous Women in the 1920s included movie stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Mary Pickford, Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson. Celebrities such as Zelda Fitzgerald, fashion designers such as Coco Chanel, writers such as Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and ground breakers and intellectuals such as Margaret Mead and Florence Sabin

Who were famous African American Women in the 1920s? Famous African American Women in the 1920s included Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Adelaide Hall, Ma Rainey and Lena Horne.

Pictures of Famous Women in the 1920s: Movie Stars
The photographs and pictures of the Women in the 1920s are a useful addition to the facts sheet, illustrating the hairstyles, make-up, fashion and clothes worn by the movie stars and celebrities of the 1920's who had made their names as Famous Women in the 1920s. The names of the women, who were also renown Flappers of the era, are Bebe Daniels, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Louise Brooks, Norma Talmadge, Colleen Moore and Norma Shearer.

Women in the 1920s Facts for kids The following fact sheet contains interesting facts and information on Women in the 1920s for kids.

Facts about the Women in the 1920s for kids

Women in the 1920s Fact 1: The 19th Amendment: The 19th Amendment was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919 and was ratified on August 18, 1920 and the Women's Suffrage Clause gave the right of women to vote. For facts about the women who worked so hard to achieve this refer to Women's suffrage

The new, exuberant dance moves required considerable freedom of movement and this influenced the convenient, less constricted fashion of women in the 1920's.

The names of the dances included the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Shimmy, the Turkey trot, the Cake walk, the Bunny hop and the Lindy Hop.

Women in the 1920s Fact 15: Divorce : Divorce was made easier in the 1920's. Women in the 1920's were not content just to stay at home and put up with bad husbands and the number of divorces doubled in America

Continued...

Facts about the Women in the 1920s for kids

Facts about the Women in the 1920s for kids The following fact sheet continues with facts about Women in the 1920s for kids.

Facts about Women in the 1920s for kids

Women in the 1920s Fact 24: Edith Wharton: Edith Wharton became the first woman in America to win the Pulitzer Prize for
her novel The Age of Innocence.

Women in the 1920s Fact 28: Margaret Mead: In 1928 Margaret Mead, one of the first woman anthropologists, published
Coming of Age in Samoa describing life in a Pacific island culture.

Facts about Women in the 1920s for kids

1920's Women in the 1920s Facts for kids: List of Famous Women in the 1920s Many of the names of Famous Women in the 1920s are detailed on the following list.

List of Famous Women in the 1920s

Clara Bow ● Coco Chanel ● Joan Crawford ● Colleen Moore ● Barbara Stanwyck ● Florence Sabin ● Edith Wharton ● Margaret Sanger ● Margaret Mead ● Aimee Semple McPherson ● Billie Holiday ● Lena Horne ● Amy Johnson ● Coco Chanel ● Zora Neale Hurston ● Anita Loos ● Louise Brooks ● Norma Shearer ● Norma Talmadge ● Bebe Daniels ● Nella Larsen ● Gloria Swanson ● Ella Fitzgerald ● Mary Pickford ● Augusta Savage ● Gertrude Ederle ● Genevieve R. Cline ● Amelia Earhart ● Phoebe Omlie ● Rebecca Felton ● Gilda Gray ● Josephine Baker ● Bessie Smith ● Zelda Fitzgerald ● Dorothy Parker

List of Famous Women in the 1920s

Facts about Women in the 1920s: The Roaring Twenties for kids
For visitors interested in the history of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age and Women in the 1920s refer to the following articles:

Women in the 1920s for kids
The article on the Women in the 1920s provides detailed facts and a summary of the most important events and dates in the history of the United States - a crash course in American History. The following video will give you additional important facts, history and dates about the personal and political lives of all the US Presidents.

Women in the 1920s

● Interesting Facts about Women in the 1920s for kids and schools Women in the 1920s for kidsfamous females - Roles in Society - 19th Amendment● Fast, fun facts about the Women in the 1920s
● Fashion, clothes and pictures of
● The Role of Women in the 1920s, list of famous celebrities
● List of names of
Fast, Fun Facts about the
● Women in the 1920s, names, roles and fashion
● Women in the 1920s for schools, homework, kids and children

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Women in the 1920s Facts for kids: Fast Fact Sheet Fast, fun facts and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about the Famous Women in the 1920s. What were the roles of Women in the 1920s? The roles of Women in the 1920s varied considerably. The majority of women remained in the traditional role of housewife.

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Odd Facts and Stories from Prohibition

Congress had its own bootlegger known as the Man in the Green Hat.

Members of Congress who wanted alcohol during Prohibition could turn to Capitol Hill's top bootlegger, George L. Cassiday. Cassiday walked through the halls of Congress making up to 25 deliveries of illegal booze a day while Capitol Police allowed him in at all hours. Over five years he supplied bottles of whiskey, moonshine, Scotch, bourbon and gin from a sturdy leather briefcase. His politician friends got him a room to work out of in the House Office Building. In 1925, when he was arrested while ferreting six quarts of whiskey to a House member, he had on a light green hat, and from press accounts the "Man in the Green Hat" stuck. Cassiday pleaded guilty and simply switched to selling in the Senate Office Building. His infamy spread to the office of Vice President Charles Curtis, who set up a sting operation in 1930 with a Prohibition agent "dry spy" watching Cassiday from the Senate's stationery store. Cassiday was arrested with six bottles of gin and his client list (which was never published). He was sentenced to a year in prison. Cassiday later wrote that he helped 80 percent of Congress violate Prohibition laws.

Herbert Hoover never referred to Prohibition as "a noble experiment."

Many books and articles on Prohibition have quoted President Herbert Hoover describing Prohibition as "a noble experiment." But Hoover himself complained that he was misquoted. Hoover was a confirmed supporter of Prohibition and campaigned for it the year he was elected president in 1928. He made this pro-dry statement at the Republican National Convention that year: "Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose." But years after leaving office, Hoover said he was misunderstood. "This phrase, 'a great social experiment, noble in motive,' was distorted into a 'noble experiment,' which of course was not at all what I said or intended to say. It was an unfortunate phrase because it could be turned into derision. Moreover, to regard the Prohibition law as an 'experiment' did not please the extreme drys, and to say it was 'noble in motive' did not please the extreme wets."

Al Capone's oldest brother was a Prohibition enforcement agent.

While his younger brother Al built a criminal empire based on illegal liquor in Chicago in the 1920s, James Vincenzo Capone enforced Prohibition laws for the federal Indian Affairs administration on reservations of the Winnebago and Omaha tribes in Nebraska. Vincenzo, the eldest of the six Capone brothers, had changed his name to Richard Joseph Hart to hide his identity and in tribute to the silent movie cowboy, William S. Hart. After a stint in the circus, Vincenzo settled in the small town of Homer, Nebraska. He served as Homer's town marshal, wore Western-style garb and hat and a pair of six guns that garnered him the nickname of "Two-Gun" Hart. With Indian Affairs in 1922, he was a special officer assigned to investigate bootlegging. While in Sioux City, Iowa, he killed a suspected bootlegger. He was charged with manslaughter but beat the rap. Later, while on another term as marshal of Homer, he lost his badge on suspicion of theft. He reunited with the Capone family in 1940, met his ailing brother Al in Miami and started receiving financial aid from them. He died in 1952.

The end of Prohibition made U.S. constitutional history.

The repeal of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) by the 21st Amendment was the first and only time the Constitution was amended by state constitutional conventions - instead of state legislatures - and the only time an amendment abolished a previous one.

The Prohibition Party still exists.

Among the early organizations to support prohibiting alcohol in the United States was the Prohibition Party, formed in 1869 with the intent to elect politicians opposed to alcoholic beverages. The Prohibition Party remains America's oldest third party. It was the first political party to permit women as members. Thomas Nast, the famed cartoonist for Harper's Weekly in the late 1800s who created the elephant to symbolize the Republican Party and the donkey for Democrats, settled on the camel for the Prohibition Party, since that animal drinks only water. The Prohibition Party is today little more than a curiosity with very little support left. Its platform remains opposed to alcohol as well as tobacco. Its candidate for president of the United States in 2012 garnered just 519 votes nationwide. In 2016, the party nominated James Hedges of Iowa for president and Bill Bayes of New York for vice president.

Some of the top leaders of women's rights started out in the temperance movement that led to Prohibition.

Women's rights activists of the 19th century such as Susan B. Anthony, Amanda Bloomer and Lucy Stone started out in the anti-alcohol, or temperance, movement. The unprecedented impact women had on the temperance movement led not only to Prohibition but to women's suffrage. The drive that led to the 18th Amendment no doubt propelled the states, only a year after enacting Prohibition, to pass the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote nationally in 1920.

The term "speakeasy" did not originate during Prohibition.

It came from the two-word phrase "speak easy," coined by American journalist Samuel Hudson back in 1889. Hudson, in his 1909 book Pennsylvania and Its Public Men, recalled that while in Pittsburgh in 1889, a new city liquor licensing law reduced the number of taverns there to only 96. That encouraged a rise in illegal bars all over town. Hudson asked Tim O'Leary, a local Democratic Party politician, to show him one. O'Leary explained that an elderly Irish widow who sold illegal beer and whiskey once warned her patrons, in her brogue, to "spake asy, now, the police are at the dure." So, Hudson said, "Spake asy" became the moniker for the hundreds of unlicensed taverns in Pittsburgh. When Hudson returned home to Philadelphia, he wrote a column about the "speak easy" in the daily newspaper, The Item. "It is I who brought to Philadelphia and popularized the term 'speak easy' as applied to illicit liquor joints," Hudson boasted in his book, published 11 years before Prohibition. "The term had an instantaneous success, being taken up by the people and police, and it has been in universal use ever since."

Speakeasies often were located behind doors painted green.

During Prohibition, chances were that a door painted green meant it fronted a speakeasy. In Chicago, that tradition lives on with two of the town's well-known bars dating from the 1920s. The Green Door Tavern on North Orleans Street is an Irish pub that opened in 1921 (a bar called The Drifter, also a former Prohibition speakeasy, is tucked away in the Green Door's basement). On North Broadway, the famed Green Mill Cocktail Lounge once was a speakeasy part-owned by "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn of Al Capone's Outfit. Capone, also a partner in the Green Mill, used to sit in a booth that is still inside the lounge. When comedian Joe E. Lewis refused to perform at the Green Mill in 1927, McGurn sent over three men who cut Lewis' throat and face (he survived, and Capone paid for his medical work). McGurn was initially charged in the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre but he beat the rap due to lack of evidence.

In addition to fighting the ill effect of drunkenness, Prohibition supporters were motivated by a desire to derail political corruption.

One reason the Prohibition cause caught fire in America in the early 1900s was the public's resentment over the spread and corrupting influence of the saloon. Indeed, the most powerful pro-Prohibition organization, founded in 1893, was the Anti-Saloon League. Tens of thousands of saloons, most of them in the country's expanding urban areas, sold beer and liquor to almost anyone, including teenagers, and became influential in the community as meeting places for political and fraternal groups. The surplus of saloons made public drunkenness a common sight on city streets.

Saloons operated based on local political corruption. Owners leased bars to managers who might have to bribe city officials to get a license and police to avoid licensing problems. Major breweries - providing beer, the dominate drink in saloons - often owned many saloons, forcing managers to buy only their products. The liquor companies used their saloons as political meeting spots to deliver votes to candidates for political offices. To the communities around them, the ubiquitous saloons and the booze businesses supplying them represented the social and political scourges of alcohol. The "dry" movement sold the "prohibition" of manufacturing, transporting and selling alcohol as a way to eliminate the saloon, and the public pressured Congress and the states for it. Prohibition closed the saloons. Hundreds of breweries simply went out of business. Underground speakeasies - unlike saloons, friendly to female patrons - replaced them, but Prohibition put an end to the culture of the saloon that had dominated American city life.

In an age of segregation, Prohibition brought white and black patrons together in "black and tan" clubs.

In many parts of the United States in the 1920s, segregation of black and white was the rule, if not the law. But the peculiar circumstances of the Prohibition era challenged that. So-called "black and tans" referred to speakeasies and nightclubs where whites and blacks socialized and danced together as patrons. Ironically, Prohibition began right as jazz music was emerging as the pop music of America, mostly among the younger white set. In New York, the center of American jazz in the mid-'20s, many young whites went to the predominately black Harlem district to mingle and hear jazz performed by mostly African-American band members in small clubs. The same thing happened in the many jazz clubs on Chicago's South Side. Dance crazes of the 1920s, such as the Charleston, Foxtrot, and Lindy Hop, were popularized by mostly the white crowd bopping to jazz music.

Among the more well-known "black and tan" clubs during Prohibition were Connie's Inn (owned by bootlegger Conrad Immerman) and Small's Paradise in New York, the Sunset Café (where jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway played) in Chicago, and the Alhambra - renamed the Black and Tan in 1933 - on Jackson Street in Seattle. Other speakeasies for the wealthy, such as the Cotton Club, owned by bootlegger Owney Madden, in Harlem, had whites as patrons with African-Americans as jazz performers and service staff.

The term "black and tan" for an integrated bar or place did not originate in the 1920s but was in use decades earlier. American journalist and photographer Jacob Riis coined the phrase repeatedly in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives. Riis's book chronicled the lives of impoverished people of various ethnic groups living in New York's cramped and dirty tenements in the 1880s. "The borderland where the white and black races meet in common debauch, the aptly named black-and-tan saloon, has never been debatable ground from a moral standpoint. It has always been the worst of the desperately bad," Riis wrote.
Next Story: Gold Diggers, Snuggle Pups and the Bee's Knees

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Odd Facts and Stories from Prohibition - Prohibition: An Interactive History

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Congress had its own bootlegger known as the Man in the Green Hat. Members of Congress who wanted alcohol during Prohibition could turn to Capitol Hill's top bootlegger, George L. Cassiday. Cassiday walked through the halls of Congress making up to 25 deliveries of illegal booze a day while Capitol Police allowed him in at all hours.

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1. Prohibition had been tried before.

In the early 19th century, religious revivalists and early teetotaler groups like the American Temperance Society campaigned relentlessly against what they viewed as a nationwide scourge of drunkenness. The activists scored a major victory in 1851, when the Maine legislature passed a statewide prohibition on selling alcohol. A dozen other states soon instituted "Maine Laws" of their own, only to repeal them a few years later after widespread opposition and riots from grog-loving citizens (Kansas later instituted a separate ban in 1881). Calls for a "dry" America continued into the 1910s, when deep-pocketed and politically connected groups such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union gained widespread support for anti-alcohol legislation on Capitol Hill.

2. World War I helped turn the nation in favor of Prohibition.

Prohibition was all but sealed by the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, but the conflict served as one of the last nails in the coffin of legalized alcohol. Dry advocates argued that the barley used in brewing beer could be made into bread to feed American soldiers and war-ravaged Europeans, and they succeeded in winning wartime bans on strong drink. Anti-alcohol crusaders were often fueled by xenophobia, and the war allowed them to paint America's largely German brewing industry as a threat. "We have German enemies in this country, too," one temperance politician argued. "And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller."

3. It wasn't illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment only forbade the "manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors"-not their consumption. By law, any wine, beer or spirits Americans had stashed away in January 1920 were theirs to keep and enjoy in the privacy of their homes. For most, this amounted to only a few bottles, but some affluent drinkers built cavernous wine cellars and even bought out whole liquor store inventories to ensure they had healthy stockpiles of legal hooch.

4. Some states refused to enforce Prohibition.

Along with creating an army of federal agents, the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act stipulated that individual states should enforce Prohibition within their own borders. Governors resented the added strain on their public coffers, however, and many neglected to appropriate any money toward policing the alcohol ban. Maryland never even enacted an enforcement code, and eventually earned a reputation as one of the most stubbornly anti-Prohibition states in the Union. New York followed suit and repealed its measures in 1923, and other states grew increasingly lackadaisical as the decade wore on. "National prohibition went into legal effect upward of six years ago," Maryland Senator William Cabell Bruce told Congress in the mid-1920s, "but it can be truly said that, except to a highly qualified extent, it has never gone into practical effect at all."

5. Drug stores continued selling alcohol as "medicine."

The Volstead Act included a few interesting exceptions to the ban on distributing alcohol. Sacramental wine was still permitted for religious purposes (the number of questionable rabbis and priests soon skyrocketed), and drug stores were allowed to sell "medicinal whiskey" to treat everything from toothaches to the flu. With a physician's prescription, "patients" could legally buy a pint of hard liquor every ten days. This pharmaceutical booze often came with seemingly laughable doctor's orders such as "Take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated." Many speakeasies eventually operated under the guise of being pharmacies, and legitimate chains flourished. According to Prohibition historian Daniel Okrent, windfalls from legal alcohol sales helped the drug store chain Walgreens grow from around 20 locations to more than 500 during the 1920s.

6. Winemakers and brewers found creative ways to stay afloat.

While many small distilleries and breweries continued to operate in secret during Prohibition, the rest had to either shut their doors or find new uses for their factories. Yuengling and Anheuser Busch both refitted their breweries to make ice cream, while Coors doubled down on the production of pottery and ceramics. Others produced "near beer"-legal brew that contained less than 0.5 percent alcohol. The lion's share of brewers kept the lights on by peddling malt syrup, a legally dubious extract that could be easily made into beer by adding water and yeast and allowing time for fermentation. Winemakers followed a similar route by selling chunks of grape concentrate called "wine bricks."

7. Thousands died from drinking tainted liquor.

Enterprising bootleggers produced millions of gallons of "bathtub gin" and rotgut moonshine during Prohibition. This illicit hooch had a famously foul taste, and those desperate enough to drink it also ran the risk of being struck blind or even poisoned. The most deadly tinctures contained industrial alcohol originally made for use in fuels and medical supplies. The federal government had required companies to denature industrial alcohol to make it undrinkable as early as 1906, but during Prohibition it ordered them to add quinine, methyl alcohol and other toxic chemicals as a further deterrent. Coupled with the other low-quality products on offer from bootleggers, this tainted booze may have killed more than 10,000 people before the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

8. The Great Depression helped fuel calls for a repeal.

By the late 1920s, Americans were spending more money than ever on black market booze. New York City boasted more than 30,000 speakeasies, and Detroit's alcohol trade was second only to the auto industry in its contribution to the economy. With the country bogged down by the Great Depression, anti-Prohibition activists argued that potential savings and tax revenue from alcohol were too precious to ignore. The public agreed. After Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a repeal during the 1932 presidential campaign, he won the election in a landslide. Prohibition was dead a year later, when a majority of states ratified the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th. In New Orleans, the decision was honored with 20 minutes of celebratory cannon fire. Roosevelt supposedly marked the occasion by downing a dirty martini.

9. Drinking decreased during Prohibition.

The "Roaring Twenties" and the Prohibition era are often associated with unchecked use and abuse of alcohol, yet the statistics tell a different tale. According to a study conducted by M.I.T. and Boston University economists in the early 1990s, alcohol consumption actually fell by as much as 70 percent during the early years of the "noble experiment." The levels jumped significantly in the late-1920s as support for the law waned, but they remained 30 percent lower than their pre-Prohibition levels for several years after the passage of the 21st Amendment.

10. It continues in some parts of the country to this day.

Even after the repeal of Prohibition, some states maintained a ban on alcohol within their own borders. Kansas and Oklahoma remained dry until 1948 and 1959, respectively, and Mississippi remained alcohol free until 1966-a full 33 years after the passage of the 21st Amendment. To this day, 10 states still contain counties where alcohol sales are prohibited outright.

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10 Things You Should Know About Prohibition

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In the early 19th century, religious revivalists and early teetotaler groups like the American Temperance Society campaigned relentlessly against what they viewed as a nationwide scourge of drunkenness. The activists scored a major victory in 1851, when the Maine legislature passed a statewide prohibition on selling alcohol.

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prohibition and crime noah brownfebruary 26, 2016 11 prohibitionin january of 1920, the 18th amendment was ratified, rendering all sales, production,

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Prohibition was enacted on January 16, 1920 which made it illegal to sale, manufacture, and transport alcohol nationwide, and lasted until March 22, 1933. During this time, The Great Depression plagued the nation with economic deprivation causing significant stress on the sole provider of the household. Customarily, the sole provider was the man of the house; however, the women also voiced strong opinions.

Some women applauded the prohibition of alcohol by joining organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The WTCU was established by women who were tired of drunk husbands squandering the family income on alcohol. Other females opposed the act by becoming saloon girls at underground speakeasies. Saloon girls were usually single and needed the job as a source of income. Due to women's suffrage during this time, female opinions rarely made a difference.

So, why were female attitudes important during Prohibition? Well lets take a look!

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Prohibition was enacted on January 16, 1920 which made it illegal to sale, manufacture, and transport alcohol nationwide, and lasted until March 22, 1933. During this time, The Great Depression plagued the nation with economic deprivation causing significant stress on the sole provider of the household.

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Prohibition, and its Effects on Chicagoans, and Organized Crime

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You've never been to a saloon. Maybe there was a kitschy bar in your hometown with "saloon" in its name, but, rest assured, it was in name only. You've never been to a bonafide, old-fashioned saloon, because Prohibition wiped them off the map.

If you're a woman or a man who cares about women, the death of the
saloon was a good thing. Saloons were generally the dirty, male-dominated spaces that sapped their families' finances and barred women from having any fun inside themselves. While saloons frequently functioned as working-class community centers, few welcomed female patrons who weren't sex workers.

By pretty much all accounts, saloons could be and often were nasty places. They bred machismo, reeked of stale beer and sometimes featured "piss troughs" at the bar. (These may have been meant to catch spilled beer, but the name hints at a darker purpose.) Often their windows were tinted or covered so passersby couldn't see who was there or what they were doing. There were so many of these establishments, and their alcoholic commodities so popular, that beer was cheaper than water, authorCatherine Gilbert Murdock told The Huffington Post.

New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Americans had different reasons for voting to enact the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act -- together banning the production and sale of alcohol -- in 1920. Some were interested in promoting Christian morality, or improving national health and productivity. But American women, a group that gained political momentum over the latter half of the 19th century, were especially focused on eradicating saloon culture. Not everyone's motivations were entirely pure -- the primarily middle-class movement being tinged with some xenophobia and classism -- but, to many women, Prohibition meant cleaning up the behavior of men they called husbands and fathers.

"Having a husband who had a drinking problem could be a really serious issue," Juilliard professor Lisa Andersen told The Huffington Post. Saloons were where their husbands got drunk, spending the family's hard-earned money on beer or gambling. (Hilariously, the novelist Jack London once described saloons as places where "men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs and there was an atmosphere of greatness.") Some became alcoholics, coming home to abuse their wives and children, or unable to hold onto a job. Andersen noted that certain women even filed civil suits against saloons and bartenders for the income their husbands drank away.

"Historically, it is not America that has had a drinking problem, it is American men," Murdock wrote in Domesticating Drink: Men, Women, and Alcohol in America 1870-1940. In defeating the saloon, however priggish their mission seemed, women hoped they could better protect the home.

Prohibition, or the Noble Experiment, would come to be known as a failure: People drank anyway, many thoroughly, and newspaper headlines were littered with fresh incidents of gangster violence. But the movement did succeed in one critical way: Saloons shut down. And in their place came a new social drinking culture, where men and women imbibed together at hidden speakeasy bars.

Hulton Archive via Getty Images

"In the 1920s, women became people," Murdock said, noting that the glittering picture of flappers in fur coats was mostly limited to big metropolitan areas like New York. Outside those places, drinking during Prohibition was a much more ho-hum affair. Nonetheless, the image of carefree coed drinking was a compelling one that would be immortalized in movies and other media for decades.

With saloons out of business, "the rules of the past [went]out the window with it," journalist Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise And Fall Of Prohibition, told HuffPost. "Then it [became] kind of sporting for men and women to go [drink] together." Speakeasies made adjustments to attract patrons of both sexes, including offering table service so women needn't go up to the bar. They played music. People danced.

Prohibition also kicked open the gate to hard liquor for women. Sure, it was covered up with sweet syrups in a cocktail, but you probably wouldn't have wanted to drink it straight anyway -- much of the liquor available in the Prohibition era was disgusting. And so the "gatekeeping status" of hard liquor as a man's drink, Andersen explained, no longer applied. Increasingly, drinking became a social pastime for men and women alike -- and, more importantly, something they could do together.

Were it not for Prohibition, it's difficult to say when widespread co-ed public drinking and socializing would have turned into a popular pastime. Saloons would have likely died out eventually. Gender relations were already quickly changing, most notably when women finally won the right to vote beginning in 1920 -- the same year Prohibition went into effect.

Technological advances also would have likely created more social drinking opportunities for women even without Prohibition,as more people bought refrigerators, and canned beer made at-home drinking more convenient.

"Absolutely, the saloon would have disappeared," Okrent said. But Prohibition inarguably expedited the process.

After 13 years, Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933, and legal drinking establishments sprung back into action. But not in the same way. Speakeasy bar culture had won out. And while some bars remained male-only into the 1970s, the macho air of saloon culture no longer exclusively governed public drinking.

There are certainly many aspects of American drinking culture that are still gendered, as Michelle McClellan, an assistant history professor at the University of Michigan, told HuffPost over email. Particularly in one place.

New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

"Sports bars certainly retain that association of masculinity with drinking leftover from the saloon era," McClellan wrote, "while certain cocktails seem marked as feminine." Perhaps you've heard of an apple martini.

We're still battling for equality between genders in all areas of society, bars included. But thanks in small part to one of America's greatest failures, women can now sit down in any dingy watering hole they please and enjoy a drink.

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Reporter, HuffPost

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Ladies Who Like To Drink Owe A Little Thanks To Prohibition

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You've never been to a saloon. Maybe there was a kitschy bar in your hometown with "saloon" in its name, but, rest assured, it was in name only. You've never been to a bonafide, old-fashioned saloon, because Prohibition wiped them off the map.

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The Roaring 20's: Crash Course US History #32