The temperance movement seized American public life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, galvanizing women in a mass social crusade. Linked to the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements – with which it shared prominent intellectuals and overlapping leadership, including the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony – the temperance movement was part of a mass mobilization of American women fighting for social change. Like the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements, temperance eventually achieved its political goal: for the 13 years of Prohibition, 1920 to 1933, the sale and consumption of alcohol was banned in the US.

But unlike its sister struggles, the temperance movement now has a bit of a bad reputation. It is easy to see the woman-led, often explicitly religious movement as a group of reactionaries, attempting to impose moral obsequiousness on a public that did not share their values. In the end, Prohibition itself was an obscene failure: alcohol continued to be sold and consumed, and the government’s vain attempts to enforce the ban on booze bred their own kinds of violence. The leaders of the movement were mocked as nagging housewives, out to ruin the fun. The temperance movement petered out, and is now remembered as a Pollyannaish bust.

But the motivations and makeup of the temperance movement are more complicated than their simplified legacy would suggest. Rather than a regressive movement consumed with moralist disdain for alcohol use, many of its most ardent supporters wanted alcohol banned for a much more practical reason: women’s safety. Drunk men, they observed, were more likely to sexually assault women, more likely to beat their wives and children, and more likely to subject passing women to sexual harassment. They didn’t all see drunkenness as an offense to their Christian morality, although some of them did. For the most part, they saw male drunks as a threat to women’s safety.

In other words: temperance has come to be seen as a movement of nagging housemarms, but it could be better understood as a mass movement against domestic violence.

Perhaps the feminist energy of the temperance movement is why the liquor industry lobbied so hard no only against the temperance movement, but against women’s right to vote. As more and more states granted women the right to vote, the newly empowered female electorate voted overwhelmingly for local candidates who opposed alcohol – that is, in the temperance movement’s mind, who opposed male violence against women.

Terrified that the local push for “dry” laws would succeed at the national level if women were granted the right to vote, the liquor lobby deliberately funded the campaigns of national politicians who opposed women’s suffrage. Under their pressure, the women’s suffrage movement languished in Congress for 42 years.

In the end, temperance at least succeeded in ending the male drinking culture that had prevailed before Prohibition: during the years when alcohol consumption was technically illegal, the traditionally male-only taverns and saloons gave way to mixed-sex speakeasies. But the movement did not succeed in severing the link between alcohol consumption and male violence.

Many of the connections that the temperance crusaders noticed between male violence against women and male drunkenness have been maintained into the modern era. Men are twice as likely as women to binge drink, and male consumption of alcohol is linked to increased violence even when adjusted for a range of variables. Studies have shown that the number of alcohol sellers in a given area is directly correlated to the prevalence of domestic violence. And 88% of rapists on college campuses use alcohol during or just before the rape. A majority of college rapists who incapacitate their victims or use drugs to assist their violence use alcohol to do so. It’s not clear whether alcohol consumption in men prompts the desire to commit sexual violence (ie a drunk man spontaneously realizes that he wants to rape someone) or whether the desire to commit sexual violence prompts alcohol consumption (ie a man realizes that he wants to rape someone, and so drinks to work up the nerve) but it’s clear that men who are drunk are more likely to hurt women.

Acknowledging this connection between alcohol and sexual violence is usually the province of moralizing misogynists, who use it as an excuse to chastise women not to drink. This was the tack taken by the contrarian writer Emily Yoffee, who in 2013 wrote in Slate of warning her college-age daughter not to drink lest men take advantage of her drunkenness to sexually assault her. But the fact remains that, although alcoholism and binge drinking are on the rise among women, they are still not nearly as prevalent among women as they are among men – nor are they linked to an attendant increase in violence by women. In short, it is by and large men, not women, who get violent when they are drunk.

Given this reality, the Temperance movement’s focus on male drunkenness as a public health issue for women seems prescient. While contemporary concerns about the health impacts of drinking focus on the damage done to the drinker – the impact, say, on his liver, brain, and heart – there might be a greater moral claim for considering the health effects of men’s drinking on women. What is the price that women pay in enduring sexual violence, sexual harassment and domestic violence, for men’s good time? Is all this female suffering worth it to us for the male privilege to drink? Should men, really, be allowed to drink alcohol?

Prohibition taught us that outright bans on booze don’t work, and a ban on alcohol consumption by men wouldn’t work, either. In a world in which men were banned from buying alcohol and women were not, sellers would sense a market, and sell booze to men illegally; women would turn on other women and give alcohol to men illegally, too. But the premise remains a useful one, at least as a provocation, or a thought experiment: what if we took women’s safety as seriously as we took men’s pleasure? What would such a commitment obligate us to do?

One of the most radical advocates of the Temperance movement was a woman named Carrie Nation, a Missouri woman who lost her first husband to alcoholism. She became famous for barging into all-male taverns with a hatchet; she would smash the liquor bottles and wooden barrels of beer. In her time, Nation was despised as a radical; in retrospect, however, I think she had a point. Nation, who was also a crusader against corsets (she argued, correctly, that they were detrimental to women’s health), had a very particular vision when she stormed into bars.

When she took her axe to the bottles, she saw herself as taking an axe to the forces that enabled domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape. That goal, at least, is worth raising a glass to.