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.But these were tricks of the body, final spasms; theywere not signs of returning vigor.One evening, after recovering suf-ficiently to be able to sit up in a chair, he reached out for a book but,without touching it, lurched forward, dead. He was mourned by friendand foe alike, although the former had a distinct edge in sincerity.By that time, Americans had been living under Prohibition for sevenand a half years.The late Wayne Wheeler was a smart man, well-attuned to his time.He must have known that there would not be an-other seven and a half. 10The HummingbirdBeats the Oddshere is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amend- ment, said its co-sponsor, Senator Morris Shepard, Demo-crat from Texas, speaking on the record and for the ages andnot acknowledging the fact that, by putting up a still on hisproperty, he had already enacted his own, personal repeal,T as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars withthe Washington Monument tied to its tail. A year and a half after Prohibition began, the NineteenthAmendment to the Constitution followed it into law.Itended a decades-long struggle that never should have beennecessary in the first place and gave women full membershipin the American electoral process.Section 1.The right of citizens of the United States to voteshall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by anystate on account of sex.Section 2.Congress shall have power to enforce this articleby appropriate legislation.It was believed that one of the first things women woulddo with the vote was solidify Prohibition.They would ensurethat dry legislators stayed in office and dry laws remained onthe books; they might even vote in tougher men and stricterlaws.They were upset that some drys, the more conserva-tive among them, had opposed the Nineteenth Amendment,fearing that it threatened the traditional, male-dominatedstructure of the family.And they were pleased that some257 258 Chapter 10wets, the more liberal of the breed, had worked for the amendment,believing that a male-dominated family was a problem of the same kind,if not magnitude, as a male-dominated society.But these were exceptions.In most cases, women and drys were nat-ural allies.They went back a long way together.In fact, had it not beenfor the former, the latter would not have become the power brokersthat they turned out to be.Further, there was a precedent for women to vote in favor of Prohi-bition.In New Zealand, females had won the right to vote in 1893, andshortly afterward proved instrumental in approving a ban on alcohol ona local-option basis.They went to the polls in large numbers and votedin near-unanimous fashion.Their unity made them an overnight forcein their country s politics.It did not happen in the United States.What did happen was some-thing no one foresaw, something that, even in retrospect, left most ob-servers puzzled, especially those who had hoped for a stirring affirma-tion of the Eighteenth Amendment and more teeth in the Volstead Act.Women, it seems, showed less of a concern for the provisions of theNineteenth than for what they perceived to be its symbolism, which isthat they were now, more than ever before, the equals of men.Thusthey did not flock to the voting booths as a single entity to express theirsupport for abstinence.They did not flock to the voting booths as asingle entity to express their support for anything.They remained, aswomen had always been, a collection of individuals, many of whom, inthe wake of suffrage, now demanded that they be allowed to titillatethemselves with the same pleasures as men.Some of them took up to-bacco for the first time.Others, noted Frederick Lewis Allen, weredrinking somewhat less openly [than males] but often all too effica-ciously.There were stories of daughters of the most exemplary parentsgetting drunk blotto, as their companions cheerfully put it on thecontents of the hip-flasks of the new prohibition regime, and going outjoyriding with men at four in the morning
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