That’s what Fred Minnick found when he started doing research for his 2013 book Whiskey Women. He started with the goal of learning about the history of women in the bourbon industry, but he unearthed a narrative going back much further in time. Women are credited with the invention of beer around 4,000 B.C., when they fermented barley to make the beverage. Egyptian women, Peruvian women, Dutch women—they were all brewmasters with their own particular, popular recipes. Maria Hebraea, an alchemist who was first written about in the fourth century, has been credited with building an early distilling apparatus. That device, the alembic still, is still used in some parts of Europe for making brandy or whiskey, and is a model for stills used today in the foothills of Appalachia, where people continue to make moonshine.

By the medieval era, women were distilling spirits in Western Europe, but soon they were stripped of basic rights, barred from reading and studying math or science. In some cultures, they weren’t allowed to be near alcohol. Women do not appear in most texts from this era, and there was little to no mention of these operations for many years, until they started popping back up again in the 1200s, Minnick says. Women were running apothecaries as the demand for distilled medicines increased. They made “aqua vitae”—distilled beer, wine, or spirits—for medicinal use. Until the 1500s, women distilled and sold aqua vitae relatively peacefully.

That changed during the time of witch hunts. One of the pieces of evidence that could be used to prosecute women for witchcraft, Minnick says, was to have a vial of aqua vitae in hand. If a woman was selling it to the community to get drunk, she’d receive a slap on the wrist. But if something went wrong—if a neighbor’s child died or livestock perished—that same charge could lead to a conviction of witchcraft and a sentence of death.

By the late 1700s, American women were distilling at home. Minnick is convinced he found the earliest form of dating sites in old newspapers, men put ads out for wives, sometimes specifying a preference for women who could brew beer or distill spirits (in addition to being able to make clothes and churn butter, of course).

It didn’t take long for whiskey to lose its domestic connotations. As spirits continued growing popular in America, “there [was] this incredible connection between prostitution and selling whiskey,” Minnick says. Prostitutes legally sold whiskey and earned significant commissions for their brothels. In New York City in the 1850s, for example, women made more than $2 million a year in liquor sales—close to the $3 million they were making for sex.

That caught the attention of the women of the Temperance movement, who played a key role in Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. In response, a culture of bootlegging cropped up—and women played a significant role in that as well. Gertrude "Cleo" Lythgoe was the queen of the bootleggers, a beautiful, powerful woman who, immediately after Prohibition was instituted, outsmarted the government by moving to the Bahamas and starting a wholesale whiskey company. When she died in 1964, everyone assumed she was worth millions, but none could prove it.