Armed Flapper Moonshiners and Crusading Women: Public Personas of Minnesota Women in the Early 20th Century

This paper examines how women’s gender roles were reinforced in the Twin Cities of Minnesota during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through looking at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and women who were attached to illegal activities during the Prohibition era. Examining these women allows for a glimpse into how some women may have chosen to not follow society’s expectations, but were still fulfilling those expectations in smaller actions. The gender role that was expected of was that they were to remain in the home and not touch the outside world without their husbands help. This is argued after viewing documents like newspapers and club journals that describe what the women were doing publicly in various fashions. This paper reveals that there were women who did not fit the typical mold left for them by society, but that these women were still fulfilling gendered expectations through their public actions