Such women are much in the news today, and much in the streets, too, although generally without the hatchet. Although her means were unusual and her desired ends unfashionable, she was representative of a recurring figure in American history: the woman whose activism is fuelled by anger. “But I will go out a roaring lion and I will make all hell howl.” And so she did, switching from “smashers” to hatchets after her release, and getting arrested at least thirty more times for wielding them at bars from San Francisco to Coney Island.Ĭarry Nation’s wrath was a response to matters both private and public: she was furious at her alcoholic husband, and furious at the legal system that let men like him drink freely to the detriment of women, children, and society at large. “You put me in here a cub,” she cried from behind the bars of her cell. Her first jail sentence came nearly seven months and many smithereened bars later, in Wichita. She was detained in Kiowa, but not arrested. Later that day, Nation did the same thing at two other bars in town, though when her brick failed to break the mirror at one of them she hurled a billiard ball from a nearby pool table to finish the job. On the morning of June 7, 1900, she walked into a saloon in Kiowa, told the proprietor to take cover, and began throwing her “smashers,” as she called them, at the mirror above his bar and all the bottles on it. Rocks were rare in the Red Hills of Kansas, where Carry Nation lived, so, when God commanded her to destroy establishments where alcohol was served, she gathered pieces of brick from her yard and wrapped them in brown paper to look like packages. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Eloquent rage summary