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Bootlegging Mothers and Drinking Daughters

Gender and Prohibition in Butte, Montana

Bibliographic Data

ID2731535
AuthorsMary Murphy (0000-0001-8258-2494, corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume46
Issue2
Pages174
Publication date1994-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2713337
OpenAlexW2051204083
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited1

LATE ONE EVENING IN 1922, AS FEDERAL PROHIBITION OFFICER BEN Holter drove along Nettie Street Butte, Montana, his car broke down. He asked to use a phone at a nearby house, but his attention quickly shifted from the stranded car to demon rum. The woman who answered his knock, Mrs. Maud Vogen, aroused Holter's suspicions when she denied having a phone, although one sat plain view. Holter returned a short time later with two other police officers, and his hunch paid off-they found Mrs. Vogen and another woman tending a twentygallon still and a quantity of whiskey and mash. A few days after Vogen's arrest, police apprehended her husband Andrew, who was living at another address, on the assumption that he had been of the bootleg operation. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed that Maud and Andrew Vogen had not been living together as husband and wife for some time. Maud Vogen was in sole charge of the still, and the woman with her at the time of her arrest was her mother.' In the 1920s, Butte women made, sold, and drank liquor unprecedented fashion. Decades later, a Butte woman recalled the many evenings she donned her flapper finery and headed to the dance halls where she and her friends shimmied to jazz tunes and slipped outside to share a pint of moonshine. In 1929, a Butte judge, Dan Shea, proposed a city ordinance calling for police matrons all the city's dance halls; his action was prompted by the number of women carrying whiskey flasks into the popular nightspots.2

Archaeology · Butte · Geography · American Environmental and Regional History · American Literature and Culture · Race, History, and American Society

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Citations per year0.36
Citation span2001 - 2026 (26)
Highly citedNo

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