The granite made widows of them.
Not quickly. Barre’s quarries and finishing sheds killed by the lungful, over years — the fine white dust that hung in the air of every shed in town, that settled in a man’s clothes and his hair and his lungs and never came out again. A cutter started at twenty and started coughing at thirty-five. Then the influenza came through after the war and took the ones the dust hadn’t finished.
What was left to a woman in Barre, Vermont in 1920 was a short and familiar list. Take in laundry. Mind someone else’s children. Scrub someone else’s floors.
Or buy a barrel of beer and open the front room.
A few of them did. Enough money changed hands to keep the lights on and the taxes paid — not a fortune, never a fortune, but the difference between managing and not. The men came after their shifts and sat at the kitchen table and played cards and drank, and a neighbor said afterward that the men of Barre were grateful to the widows. It gave them somewhere to go. And it gave the widows something the short list never had: their own money, earned in their own house, on terms they set.
Prohibition had been the law of the land for a matter of months.
It took effect on January 17, 1920, and it closed the saloons — thousands of them, in every city and mill town in the country. Men-only rooms, most of them, with the brass rail and the free lunch and the understanding that a respectable woman did not come through that door.
They closed. And what opened in their place, in the years after, was something nobody legislating in Washington had thought to imagine: a drinking establishment that could be run out of a parlor, by anyone, with no license to lose and no landlord’s name on the deed. The barrier to entry had been a liquor license and a lease on a storefront. Now the barrier to entry was a barrel and a room.
Women had rooms.
They called them beer flats, or home speaks — the small ones, the ones run out of living rooms and basements and back kitchens. By 1928, Prohibition officials were estimating five thousand of them in Chicago alone, and a great many were run by women. They took hold in blue-collar neighborhoods where the ethnic communities had a long tradition of beer with supper, and they filled precisely the hole the corner saloon had left: somewhere to go after the shift, somewhere the walk home was short.
Strangers weren’t welcome, as a rule. The drinkers knew each other, and they knew whose house they were in. Men sat at card tables in the family’s front room, and the beer came out of a barrel in the kitchen, poured by the woman whose kitchen it was. There’s a bit of period doggerel that catches the whole operation better than any description of mine — Papa out in the shed with the mash, Mama in the kitchen washing out the mugs, and the children counting cash and filling jugs. A family business, the way a bakery is a family business, except for the part where it wasn’t legal.
The money mattered. That’s the thing worth sitting with. For a widow, or a woman whose husband’s wages didn’t stretch, or a woman with no husband at all and no intention of acquiring one, this was income that arrived in her own hand. She set the hours. She decided who came in. She kept what she made.
And the beer had to come from somewhere. Behind every front room with a barrel in it was a supply chain, and women worked that too. The ones who ran the stills in the backwoods and the parlor distilleries in the cities, the ones who drove it and hid it and sold it on. The women who made and moved the liquor were running the same calculation from the other end of the trade, and the arithmetic came out the same way.
Further up the scale were the rooms everyone pictures when they hear the word — the clubs with the jazz band and the dance floor and the maître d’ who knew your face. New York had more speakeasies than any city in the country, with contemporary estimates running to something like thirty-two thousand, though the great bulk of those were dismal clip joints where the point was to separate a man from his money as efficiently as possible.
The ones that mattered were not dismal, and several of the most famous were run by women. Texas Guinan, who greeted her customers by calling them suckers to their faces and made them love her for it. Belle Livingstone, who ran five floors of Manhattan nightlife and had already lived three lives before she started. Helen Morgan, who sang on the piano and put her name over the door. Between the middle of the 1920s and the early 1930s the three of them held New York’s nightlife in their hands, and the arrangements behind them varied more than the legend allows. Belle raised the money and signed the lease. Morgan’s name went over doors that belonged to someone else.
What they poured had come in over the water. The good bottles — the ones worth setting on a table where a customer could read the label — came off Rum Row, the line of ships anchored just past the three-mile limit where Bill McCoy sold uncut whisky by the case and Cleo Lythgoe supplied him from Nassau. A room with a reputation needed a supplier who didn’t water the goods, and the women running these rooms knew the difference as well as any man in the trade.
There’s a detail here that gets lost in the glamour, and it’s the one that interests me most. Before Prohibition, a woman generally could not go into a saloon. After it, the speakeasy became one of the few rooms in American life — outside a church — where men and women could sit down together in the evening and drink and talk. Illegality did that. It turned out that once a room was already breaking the law, nobody was much troubled about who else was in it.
Women running these rooms have a way of turning up in my books, and it isn’t an accident. I keep finding them in the research.
Angus B. McVicar, “Jennie Justo,” May 15, 1933. Wisconsin Historical Society, Image ID W013C2O. Used by permission.
Jennie Justo was real — Madison, Wisconsin, where she took over the family speakeasy and grew it by working the university trade. A reporter of the day noted, with evident approval, that she catered to a better class of student business. After repeal she turned it legitimate and kept serving Madison for years afterward. I fictionalized her in the serial The Unstoppable Jenni Justo, and I barely had to change a thing.
And then there is Edith Duffy, who anchors the Rum Runners’ Chronicles.
Edith comes to Florida in 1932, a widow, at an age and a moment when the sensible course would have been to go quietly somewhere and be small. Her husband Mickey had been Philadelphia’s beer baron, shot dead in a hotel suite in Atlantic City the summer before. She arrives with no particular prospects and one genuine skill, which is that she knows exactly how a room like this works — the supply, the police, the till, the difference between a customer and a problem.
So she buys a speakeasy. Gator Joe’s sits out on the edge of the Everglades near Coconut Grove, with the ocean on one side and the swamp on the other, and it is not a glamorous place. Then it burns.
And Edith builds it again, larger — a nightclub this time, called Goodtimes.
That is the motion I keep coming back to, across every book I write. Not the glamour and not the gunfire. A woman standing in front of the burnt-out shell of the only thing she owns, doing the arithmetic, and deciding to start over on a bigger scale. It is what the Barre widows did with a barrel and a front room, and it is what women were doing all over early 20th-century America in those years, wherever a door came open that hadn’t been open before.
Prohibition closed the saloons. It did not close the women out. It handed them the room.
Edith’s story begins before ‘Gator Joe’s, in the rum-running waters off the Florida coast. Red Sky at Night is a free novella, and it’s yours if you’d like it — download your copy.