In the popular imagination, the story of Prohibition in America is a story of men and male violence, one full of federal agents fighting gangsters over the sale of moonshine. In contrast, Firebrands is the story of four Jazz Age dynamos--all women -who were forces behind the passage, the enforcement, the defiance, and, ultimately, the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. They battled each other directly, and they learned to marshal clout with cowed and hypocritical legislators, almost all of them men. Their clash over Prohibition stands as the first significant exercise of women's political power since women gained the right to vote, and their influence on the American political scene wouldn't be equaled for decades.

In Gioia Diliberto's fresh and timely take on this period of history, we meet Ella Boole, the stern and ambitious leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who campaigned fiercely to introduce Prohibition and fought desperately to keep it alive. We also meet Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the most powerful woman in America at the time, who served as the top federal prosecutor charged with enforcing Prohibition. Diliberto tells the story, too, of silent film star Texas Guinan, who ran New York speakeasies backed by the mob and showed that Prohibition was not only absurd but unenforceable. And, she follows Pauline Morton Sabin, a glamorous Manhattan aristocrat who belatedly recognized the cascading evil in Prohibition and mobilized the movement to kill it.

These women led their opposing forces of "Wets" and "Drys" across a teeming landscape of bootleggers, gangsters, federal agents, temperance fanatics, and cowardly politicians, many of them secret drunks. Building on the momentum of suffrage, they forged a path for the activists who followed during the great civil rights battles of the mid-twentieth century. Yet, they have been largely lost to history. In Firebrands, Diliberto finally gives these dynamic figures their due, creating a varied and dramatic portrait of women wielding power, in politics, society, and popular culture.

Gioia Diliberto is the author of four biographies, among them Diane von Furstenberg: A Life Unwrapped, Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife, and A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams, as well as three novels and a play. As a journalist, Diliberto has contributed to many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. She also teaches writing and has taught at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and DePaul and Northwestern Universities. She lives with her husband in Woodbury, Connecticut.

Diliberto will be in conversation with Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers. In August 2014, she became a writer for The Times Magazine. Born in Washington, Ms. Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. In 1983, she joined The New York Times as a metropolitan correspondent and then moved to The Times’s Washington bureau in 1986 to cover politics. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, G. P. Putnam published her first book, Bushworld. After Bushworld, Dowd switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another best seller, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. Her third book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, was released in 2016. In addition to The New York Times, Ms. Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated and others.