Carrie Nation was robbed by history.

Her legacy should be more than “old fat buzzkill lady uses her hatchet to make sure other people can’t have fun.” She was actually a feminist icon. 

When I was in school, if there were two sentences about Carrie Nation in my history textbooks, I would be shocked. The second would have to be, “And no one liked her.” 

In the time in which I grew up – way back in the 1900s – there was a lot of whitewashing of history – think slavery – to make people seem more morally upright than they were. Oh, those slaves were so happy to have kind masters! That makes it okay that so many presidents owned human beings. 

But then you have Carrie Nation, who was actually much more morally upright than most, in the best possible way, and we see her demonized as the thief of joy, the ruiner of fun, and basically the pilot version of the modern-day Karen. 

But Carrie Nation was much, much more than that.

In Carrie Nation’s America, a woman could spend her entire adult life pregnant, exhausted, broke, legally powerless, and trapped with a man who could drink away the grocery money by noon. 

Men, on the other hand, finding themselves increasingly powerless and discontented, turned to alcohol as an escape valve from the admittedly brutal economic and social systems of the day. They found that for a few pennies – or their entire paycheck – they could lose themselves in liquor and forget their woes, and their families, in drinking establishments dotting the landscape of middle America. 

Unfortunately, women and children were the ones who bore disproportionate consequences for this DIY version of self-care.

The combination of extreme poverty and wasted wages spelled disaster in American homes, where a woman might have to feed her nine children with a handful of scrounged wild onions and the heel of a loaf of bread. If she complained, she might be beaten until she had to do all of this with a broken arm and a couple of missing teeth. 

For some reason, Carrie Nation took offense to this order of things. She saw, as the common denominator, the aforementioned ubiquity of drinking establishments. She spoke out, she wrote tracts, she urged civic leaders to do something to change the plight of women and children. 

When none of her efforts seemed to have any effect, Carrie Nation did what any morally upright, socially conscious woman would do: She broke shit.

She went into bars, told the guys running them to stop ruining families, warned them what would happen – and then she destroyed their bars. If no one else was going to do it, Carrie Nation would.

The fact is, temperance was a thing, but it wasn’t as widely known as it came to be after Nation made it famous. It almost seemed as if it was a man’s right to beat his wife, beat his children, allow them to starve – all while society insisted he was the family’s rightful protector and provider. There was something rotten in Denmark – and Kansas – and Carrie Nation took some pretty serious steps to illustrate how rotten it was. 

She was a church leader. She brought people into her home so they’d have a place to live. She cared deeply about women and children. She was a woman way ahead of her time. She had likely never even heard of the word feminist; she probably just thought of herself as a Christian.

And honestly, that’s the best endorsement for Christianity I can think of.