Edith Duffy stands behind the bar at Gator Joe’s for the first time, resting her hands on the dusty countertop. The roof is missing shingles. The windows are missing glass. A stuffed alligator grins from the wall above shelves scattered with cobwebbed bottles. Her friend Mae thinks she’s lost her mind.
But Edith isn’t seeing the ruin. She’s seeing the room full of thirsty patrons she’ll serve, the music she’ll bring in, the life she’ll build from scratch in this crumbling roadhouse on the Florida coast. She’s a gangster’s widow with a pile of cash and no desire to go back to being the woman Philadelphia made her. She wants a second chance. And in 1932, at the ragged end of Prohibition, a second chance for a woman looks like a speakeasy in the middle of nowhere — a business no respectable woman should run, in an industry that technically doesn’t exist.
That scene from the Rum Runners’ Chronicles grew out of something I kept finding in the research: women who built businesses inside an illegal economy, not because they were thrill-seekers but because the illegal economy was the only one that would let them in. The popular image of Prohibition women is all glamour and danger — flappers in sequined dresses, gun-wielding molls, daring midnight runs. And some of that existed. But underneath the mythology, what the historical record shows is something far more ordinary and far more remarkable: women running businesses. Making decisions about product and pricing and distribution. Managing risk. Feeding their families.
The difference was, their businesses were illegal. And that illegality, paradoxically, was the very thing that let them in.
Here’s what most people don’t realize about Prohibition: distilling was already considered women’s work.
For centuries, brewing and distilling had been domestic skills, part of the household economy, no different from canning or soap-making. Women made beer, wine, cordials, and spirits as a matter of course. It was only when commercial distilling became profitable in the nineteenth century that men took it over and professionalized it — licensing, capital, infrastructure, all the barriers that kept women on the outside of legitimate business.
Then the Eighteenth Amendment arrived in 1920, and suddenly the entire liquor industry went underground. Licensing didn’t matter anymore — you couldn’t get a license. Capital requirements dropped to whatever it cost to build a still from copper tubing and a washtub. The male gatekeepers of the legitimate liquor business were out of the picture, because there was no legitimate liquor business. And the skills that mattered — the ability to cook, to manage a household operation quietly, to run a small enterprise without drawing attention — were skills women already had.
Prohibition didn’t create women entrepreneurs. It removed the barriers that had kept them from an industry they’d been pushed out of. And thousands of women walked through that door.
The timing mattered more than most accounts acknowledge. The war ended in November 1918. Prohibition took effect in January 1920. That’s barely a year between two seismic disruptions — and the women caught between them had almost nowhere to turn.
The men who didn’t come back from France left young widows with no safety net. There was no Social Security — that wouldn’t arrive until 1935. No unemployment insurance. No reliable widow’s pension. A woman whose husband died was in immediate economic freefall. The average industrial worker’s life insurance policy, if he had one at all, covered a few months of expenses at most. After that, a widow was on her own.
And the men who did come home weren’t always the men who had left. Shell shock — what we’d now call PTSD — wasn’t understood or treated in any meaningful way. A husband might be physically present but unable to hold a job, unable to function as the breadwinner the family economy depended on. The war created a generation of women who were suddenly the sole economic engine of their households, whether their husbands were dead, damaged, or simply unable to provide. Prohibition arrived right on top of that devastation, and it handed these women one of the few industries with a low barrier to entry.
The women who turned to moonshining weren’t, for the most part, thrill-seekers. They were survivors.
Texanna Chappell was a Virginia mother of six when her husband died suddenly, leaving her with no income and children to feed. At his funeral, a relative mentioned that people were earning money as alky cookers and sent her a recipe for corn whiskey. Chappell bought the components for a still, assembled it herself, and set it up in her home. She was terrified — nervous and apprehensive about breaking the law. But her children were hungry.
She fired up the still anyway.
As the story has been passed down in regional accounts of the era, she threw a party with her first earnings — chicken, ice cream, cake, everything the children could think of. She kept cooking whiskey until she heard the police were planning a raid, at which point she dismantled the still, poured her stock down the drain, and went back to being a widow with six children and no income. The head of the federal Prohibition unit in East Tennessee reportedly acknowledged the impossible position women like Chappell faced, saying he’d let many a widow go without filing a report, because her children would have had no food.
Rosa Fontana was eighty-three years old when Prohibition agents caught her making and selling wine. She was frail enough to need help walking. Her husband was gravely ill, their savings gone. After her third arrest, she was sent to federal prison. Marie Hoppe, a widow in New Orleans, was raided after a tip from a group called the Volstead Vigilantes. She told the judge that beer was vital for a child’s muscle development. She died before her trial, leaving her children orphaned.
These stories don’t appear in the glamorous version of Prohibition. But they were far more common than the speakeasy queens and rum-running adventures. Brewing illegal liquor provided income for a surprising number of women who had no other options — particularly older women, widows, and immigrant mothers whose husbands had come back from the war unable to work. They showed remarkable nerve, operating in a business dominated by violent men, and most of them did it for the simplest possible reason: the bills had to be paid.
In the cities, women didn’t even need to leave home to enter the liquor trade. They just opened the front room.
Across immigrant neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and dozens of smaller cities, women converted their parlors into domestic speakeasies — neighborhood bars operating inside private homes. The kitchen became the distillery. The front room became the saloon. The children became lookouts, delivery runners, message carriers. It was an entire family economy operating inside the domestic sphere, which made it simultaneously invisible to outsiders — it just looked like a busy household with a lot of visitors — and deeply embedded in the neighborhood social fabric.
Everyone on the block knew which parlor to visit. The community protected these women because the community depended on them — for the income, for the gathering space, for the social glue that held a neighborhood together when the legitimate economy offered nothing. A woman running a parlor speakeasy was providing exactly what a corner saloon had always provided: a place for working people to gather, talk, drink, and feel like they belonged somewhere. She was just doing it from her own home, with her children pressed into service around her.
There’s nothing romantic about a ten-year-old watching for revenue agents from the front stoop, or a twelve-year-old delivering bottles down the block under his coat. These were children whose childhoods had been reshaped by economic necessity — the same economic necessity that drove their mothers to convert the family home into a business. The domesticity that was supposed to define women’s lives became the camouflage that made their enterprises possible. Revenue agents were far less likely to search a grandmother’s kitchen than a man’s barn. The very stereotypes that constrained women in every other arena — that they were domestic, nurturing, non-threatening — became strategic advantages in the underground economy.
It’s a bitter irony, and it runs through every corner of the Prohibition story: women’s invisibility was both the problem and the tool.
Not every whiskey woman was driven by desperation. Some saw opportunity and seized it with both hands.
Birdie Brown was among a very small number of young African American women who homesteaded alone in Montana — navigating not just the isolation of frontier life but a landscape where Black homesteaders faced contested claims, discriminatory lending, and systematic hostility. She settled near Lewistown in 1898, homesteaded along Brickyard Creek in 1913, and raised chickens, kept a garden, and planted wheat, oats, and barley on twenty-five acres. But she’s best remembered for her moonshine, which locals considered some of the finest in the country.
During Prohibition, her homestead became legendary — the rutted road to Black Butte and Birdie’s place was a familiar one to anyone in Fergus County looking for a good time and a reliable pour. Her parlor was a place of warm hospitality — and for a Black woman in rural Montana, that hospitality was also an act of community-building in a world that offered her very few welcoming spaces of her own. The moonshine operation wasn’t just income. It was a way of creating belonging on her own terms.
In May 1933, just months before the end of Prohibition would have shut down her livelihood anyway, the revenue officer came around and warned her to stop brewing. But as Birdie multitasked — dry cleaning garments with gasoline while tending what would be her last batch of hooch — the gasoline exploded. She lived a few hours, long enough to ask that someone take care of her beloved cat. The cat was never found.
And then there was Cleo Lythgoe — the Queen of the Bahamas, the woman who turned rum running into an empire.
Lythgoe started as a stenographer for a British liquor importer in New York and became the first woman to hold a wholesale liquor license. When Prohibition hit, she didn’t mourn the old business — she moved to Nassau and set up a wholesale liquor operation, importing the finest Scotch from her Scottish connections and commissioning her own flotilla of boats to run it to the American coast. She operated out of the Lucerne Hotel, known as the bootleggers’ headquarters, and she tolerated no disrespect. When a man bad-mouthed her product, she marched into the barber shop where he was sitting, dragged him out with lather still on his face, and informed him she’d put a bullet through him if he didn’t stop. He stopped.
In 1972, a university student named Tom Septembre interviewed Lythgoe at the Columbus Hotel in Miami, where she was living in her old age. He found her properly seated on what he described as an Egyptian throne, dressed as a queen, and forthcoming about every detail of her rum-running life. When she finally died, the Wall Street Journal estimated her worth at more than a million dollars, and the flags in Nassau flew at half-mast for days.
Birdie Brown brewed moonshine on a Montana homestead and died in a gasoline fire. Cleo Lythgoe ran a smuggling empire from a Bahamian hotel and died wealthy in Los Angeles at eighty-six. What they had in common was this: Prohibition gave them a door that the legitimate economy never would have, and they walked through it without waiting for permission.
Here’s the part of the Prohibition story that rarely gets told: when repeal came in December 1933, the door slammed shut.
The newly legal liquor industry re-professionalized almost overnight. Licensing requirements returned. Capital requirements soared. Regulatory compliance demanded lawyers, accountants, corporate structures — all the infrastructure that had kept women out of the legitimate liquor business before Prohibition. The barriers that the Eighteenth Amendment had accidentally dismantled went right back up, reinforced by a post-repeal regulatory framework that favored established capital over kitchen-table enterprise.
Cleo Lythgoe survived the transition because she’d built enough wealth and connections to operate on the other side of legality. But for women like Texanna Chappell and the parlor speakeasy operators and the widows who’d kept their families fed by cooking whiskey in their kitchens — repeal didn’t mean freedom. It meant the one industry that had been accessible to them was suddenly gated again, and the gatekeepers were back.
The thirteen years of Prohibition were a window — brief, dangerous, and unrepeatable — when the rules that normally kept women out of economic life cracked open just enough for thousands of them to build something. And then the window closed, and the women who’d walked through it were expected to walk back to where they’d been before, as though none of it had happened.
These are the women I built my characters from.
Maggie Barnes, in the Bootleggers’ Chronicles, isn’t a bootlegger herself — she’s a widow with a leaking roof and boarders to feed in a Philadelphia neighborhood where Mickey Duffy runs everything that matters. But she navigates the bootlegging economy every day, and she understands what it means to keep a household running when the ground underneath it is illegal.
Delores Bailey, in the Moonshiner Mysteries, brews moonshine in the mountains of Montana. She’s Birdie Brown’s literary descendant — too rough for polite society, too independent for a world that keeps trying to push women into smaller spaces. She doesn’t need anyone’s approval. She just needs to be left alone. But trouble keeps finding the one person who knows how to handle it.
And Edith Duffy, in the Rum Runners’ Chronicles, buries her gangster husband and walks away from Philadelphia to buy a speakeasy on the Florida coast. She’s Cleo Lythgoe’s energy in a fictional body — a woman who builds an enterprise from scratch in the final years of Prohibition and discovers that the family you choose can matter more than anything you left behind.
Three series. Three women. Three corners of the same Prohibition-era world where the rules were broken and the breaking, for women, turned out to be a kind of freedom — temporary, dangerous, and real.
Edith Duffy, standing behind that dusty bar at Gator Joe’s, didn’t know yet what it would cost her. She didn’t know about the men who’d try to run her out, the deals she’d have to make, the price of building something in a world that wasn’t built for women to build in. But she knew one thing — she was done waiting for permission. She’d rather wrestle a crumbling roadhouse into a business than spend one more day being the woman someone else’s life had made her.
The whiskey women of Prohibition would have recognized her. And the women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America — whether they were teaching in parish schools, fighting for the vote, or cooking whiskey in their kitchens — would have recognized each other. Different paths, different costs, the same refusal to stay small.
The whiskey women weren’t the only ones who found power — and peril — in Prohibition’s shadow economy. For more about the women who ran the speakeasy scene, meet the Queens of the Speakeasies, including Belle Livingstone, who turned a Park Avenue townhouse into the most exclusive nightclub in New York; Texas Guinan, whose greeting — “Hello, suckers!” — became the catchphrase of an era; and Helen Morgan, who sang on top of a piano because the speakeasy was too crowded for a stage.
For readers interested in women’s roles in the Prohibition-era underground economy, Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition offers an excellent overview, and Karen Abbott’s The Ghosts of Eden Park captures the era’s mixture of ambition and danger. For Cleo Lythgoe specifically, the Bahamas Historical Society archives and contemporary newspaper accounts from the Nassau Guardian provide vivid primary-source material.