Women probably put Harding in the White House..

and were crucial in the passage of Prohibition. Indeed the evangelical community, sensing correctly that if women were given the vote, Prohibition would become politically feasible, dropped their opposition to women's suffrage as a result. The female-dominated Temperance movement was motivated not simply by opposition to the ravages of alcoholism, but also by the drive to break up immigrant cultures -- Italians with their wine, Irish with their whisky, Germans and Bohemians with their beer -- and to the male spaces of taverns and saloons. The Temperance movement sought to get men away from each other and into the female-dominated realm of the home. The war on male "safe spaces" starting with taverns and saloons, moving on to service clubs such as Rotary and single sex schools, and culminating in the demise of the Boy Scouts, the great boy choirs, and boys sports, is well over a century old. While it would culminate in the war on boys and the disruption of the male life journey visible in virtually all eras and cultures in which young boys leave the female-dominated realm of the home for a few years in male spaces in which they are socialized by men and by each other, its roots are in the intertwined Temperance movement and the drive for women's suffrage. So I would say that women's suffrage provided more than an "illusion" of political power. SR