"Beauty and the Booze": Prohibition-Era Female Bootleggers and the Making of the Modern Woman

Abstract

While prohibition endures in memory as a period of partying, bootleggers, and gangsters, seldom do we exclusively examine the women who engaged in these activities. By focusing on female bootleggers, this investigation explores how women both engaged with and challenged notions of femininity during the early twentieth century to carry out crime. Through primarily utilizing newspapers contemporary to the era, it can be seen that female bootleggers played into gender roles and conceptualizations of femininity in an attempt to circumvent law enforcement. In plenty of cases this method proved to be successful, as federal agents reported female bootleggers to be more “dangerous” than their male counterparts. On the other side of the coin, female bootleggers defied gender stereotypes by forcing American society to confront the capability women had for doing crime and combatting it. Female bootleggers, despite breaking the law, were part of a larger movement that ushered in new perceptions of femininity and helped produce the “modern woman.”