Volume 36, Number 17 · November 9, 1989
The Wasp Ascendancy
By Adam Platt, Joseph W. Alsop
The other day in a secondhand book shop, I happened across a rather seedy looking little green paperbound volume I had never known to exist. It is called Women and Repeal, and it recounts the saga—a very genuine saga it was too—of the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, quite largely by efforts of the mobilized womanhood of the WASP ascendancy. Their leader on this occasion was Mrs. Charles H. Sabin, later Mrs. Dwight Davis; and her Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform beat the tar out of the formerly all-powerful Woman's Christian Temperance Union and its formidable boss, Mrs. Ella Boole, whose pince-nez had gleamed upon scenes of uninterrupted triumph since 1918.
Feature, 10431 words
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