“A man may be willing to share his vote, his Prohibition, and his troubles with the feminine sex, but he will not share his bar,” wrote a woman using the byline of “the Girl Reporter” for the Milwaukee Sentinel in July 1919. The “Girl” had just completed an informal survey of city taverns and learned that many downtown establishments either refused to serve women or would only allow ladies to indulge in an area separate from the main bar.
Solid information on the drinking habits of Milwaukee ’s women in this era is hard to find, but it seems that “stag bars,” those that refused to serve women, were fairly common in downtown around the turn of the century. The prevalence of dive bars in the old “ Badlands
