Temperance advocate famous for her demolition of barrooms with a hatchet.
The scourge of barkeepers and drinkers in Kansas and elsewhere, she received little support from the national or world temperance movements but her activities may have helped bring about the ratification of the Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution inn 1919.
Although she held teaching certificate from a state normal school, her education was intermittent.
In 1867 she married a young physician Charles Gloyd whom she left after a few months because of his alcoholism.
In 1877 she married David Nation, a lawyer, journalist and minister who divorced her in 1901 on the ground of desertion.
She entered the temperance movement in 1890 when a U.S. Supreme Court decision in favour of the importation and sale of liquor in "original packages" from other states weakened the prohibition laws of Kansas where she was living. In her view the illegality of the saloons flourishing in that state meant that anyone could destroy them with impunity.
A formidable woman nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 175 pounds she dressed in stark black and white clothing of vaguely religious appearance. Alone or accompanied by hymnsinging women she would march into a saloon and proceed to sing, pray, hurl biblicalsounding vituperations at the "rummies" present and smash the bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. At one point her fervour led her to invade the governor´s chambers at Topeka. Jailed many times she pais her fines from lecture tour fees and souvenir hatchet sales, at times earning as much as 300 dollars per week. She herself survived numerous physical assaults.
Carry Nation´s destructive urge was also directed toward fraternal orders, tobacco, foreign foods, corsets, skirts of improper length and mildly pornographic art of the sort found in some barrooms of the time.
She was an advocate of women´s suffrage.
A dispassionate biography Carry Nation (1929) by Herbert Asbury contrasts with her own disjointed book The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (1904).
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