Carry Nation (November 25, 1846 - June 9, 1911)

Born Carrie Amelia Moore on November 25, 1846, in Garrard County, Kentucky, Carry Nation cut an imposing figure. She stood at nearly 6 feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. Wielding a hatchet, she was downright frightful. In 1900, the target of Nation's wrath was the alcoholic drink. Nation felt divinely ordained to forcefully promote temperance. A brief marriage to an alcoholic in the late 1800's fueled Nation's disdain for alcohol. Kiowa, Kansas was the setting of Nation's first outburst of destruction in the name of temperance in 1900. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30 times after leading her followers in the destruction of one water hole after another with cries of "Smash, ladies, smash!" Prize-fighter John L. Sullivan was reported to have run and hid when Nation burst into his New York City saloon. Self-righteous and formidable, Nation mocked her opponents as "rum-soaked, whiskey-swilled, saturn-faced rummies." In 1903 Carrie Nation officially changed her name to “Carry,” saying it meant "“Carry A Nation for Prohibition.” When her autobiography was published she made enough money to buy a house in Kansas City, Kansas, to shelter the wives and mothers of drunkards. Later, a lecture tour took her to Great Britain. Exhausted and ill, Carry Nation retired to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and bought a house large enough for her and several women who had lost their homes because of alcoholic husbands. She collapsed while giving a lecture in Eureka Springs in January 1911 and died on June 2, 1911, at the age of 64. She is buried beside her mother in Belton, Missouri. Carry Nation’s work paved the way for two amendments to the United States Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, passed in 1919, prohibited the sale of alcohol, and the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, allowed women to vote. In 1933 Prohibition ended with another constitutional amendment. While Carrie Nation was certainly among their most colorful members, the members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, left more in their wake than strewn glass. Once the largest women's organization in the country, the W.C.T.U. concerned itself with issues ranging from health and hygiene, prison reform, to world peace.