Informal Economic Strategies During Alcohol Prohibition In Anaconda, MontanaAlcohol Prohibition

Summary

One of the many unintended consequences of the Prohibition Era was an unorganized but collective social resistance movement across the nation. Research in the town of Anaconda, Montana, focused on the years of 1923 through 1926, granted a unique opportunity to capture a snapshot of collective social resistance in a company town, and allowed a new, feminine narrative to emerge. The Prohibition years in Anaconda were put into historical, and sociocultural context by compiling lists of male and female liquor law offenders’ experiences through the use of primary sources such as newspaper accounts, court records, and oral histories. Comparison of fines, jail terms, and property seizures of male and female home brewers and business owners indicated a systematic leniency towards women offenders when all crimes were equal. Socioeconomic status’s revealed that overwhelmingly widowed women used the sale and production of illegal alcohol as an economic strategy to support their families. Unequal applications of the law on the part of city officials indicates a tolerance of illegal activity for the pragmatic financial exploitation of residents. The findings although general in nature can be used as a starting point for a more realistic discourse on how people collectively circumvented Federal Prohibition laws.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage