Many years ago my high school history teacher mentioned that the Temperance Movement gained widespread acceptance and membership among women due to extremely high rates of alcoholism (and therefore drunken domestic violence) in pre-Prohibition America. I believe he also mentioned that rates of alcoholism in the US were permanently diminished by Prohibition, despite the policy's other failings. Is this true?
The temperance movement was indeed very much focused on male alcoholism wrecking homes. Men were supposed to go off to work, women were supposed to be at home raising a family. The "licensed saloon" lay in wait, tempting the worker with his weekly wages in his pocket to come in and drink them away. It went far beyond simple domestic harmony. Factory wages were generally low, working hours long and stress on the workers therefore very high. Alcohol was indeed a temptation, and the margin of survival for industrial workers and their families was not very great. An alcoholic could easily throw his family into poverty, make them homeless.
At the time married women also had few rights: they held no property in their own names. Divorce was difficult to obtain and a black mark on a woman's character, so whether alcoholic or abusive, a husband could still be granted custody of the children. It was the recognition that male alcoholism was very much a women's issue that caused Susan B Anthony to break off from the Daughters Of Temperance to form the Women's State Temperance Society, when the male leadership of the DoT refused to let women speak. That women were bearing the brunt of the damage of alcoholism but had no power to stop it also became a major motivation for the women's suffrage movement, in which of course Anthony would be a leader.
Although the rate of alcohol consumption did fall to about 30% of what it had been, at the beginning of Prohibition. that does not seem to have lasted. There was more and more non-compliance with the Volsted Act, and also a change from previous drinking patterns. Drinking at all times of the day and night became acceptable. Drunks, instead of disgraceful, became loveably comic. And more women also started to drink- a great change from the previous century. Over the next several years, until the Depression, the rate of consumption increased to 60-70% of what it had been, and in the 1930's jumped back to pre-Prohibition levels. But what did change in the decades after Prohibition was a rise in the rights of women and in wages and working conditions generally. Alcoholism could and would still do great damage, but it was harder for it to wreck a home. And women became less powerless to extract themselves from its effects- even though they themselves would be alcoholics more often.
Okrent, Daniel (2010) Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Simon and Schuster