Firebrands

In the popular imagination, the story of Prohibition in America is a story of men and male violence, one full of federal agents fighting gangsters over the sale of moonshine. In contrast, Firebrands is the story of four Jazz Age dynamos—all women—who were forces behind the passage, the enforcement, the defiance, and, ultimately, the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

In Gioia Diliberto's take on this period of history, we meet Ella Boole, the stern and ambitious leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who campaigned to introduce Prohibition. We also meet Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who served as the top federal prosecutor charged with enforcing Prohibition. Diliberto tells the story, too, of silent film star Texas Guinan, who ran New York speakeasies backed by the mob and showed that Prohibition was not only absurd but unenforceable. And, she follows Pauline Morton Sabin, a glamorous Manhattan aristocrat who mobilized the movement to kill it.

Building on the momentum of suffrage, they forged a path for the activists who followed during the great civil rights battles of the mid-twentieth century. Yet, they have been largely lost to history. In Firebrands, Diliberto finally gives these dynamic figures their due, creating a varied and dramatic portrait of women wielding power, in politics, society, and popular culture.