A young man stands on a street corner in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, casually smoking a cigar among friends. He is unhurried and unbothered—that is, until a hand knocks the offending stogie from his lips.

“If the Lord had wanted you to smoke, he’d have put a chimney on your head!” says Carry Amelia Nation, a radical women’s rights advocate and temperance leader of the early 20th century.

Her second marriage to the sober but frivolous David Nation ultimately brought her to Medicine Lodge in 1890. Nation soon joined the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and, as she ministered to inmates, she saw how alcohol had led them to a life behind bars.

Kansas had become the first U.S. state to approve a statewide constitutional prohibition on alcohol in 1881. In this restriction, Nation saw an opportunity. Armed with a steel rod or bricks wrapped in newspaper, she and WCTU colleagues began smashing saloons around 1900, smashing six bars in Kiowa, Kansas. A short but stout woman, standing at around 5’4”, Nation would break the liquor bottles and kegs behind the bar, destroy any lewd pictures she came across, and scold saloon owners and patrons. While these raids led to some saloon closings, Kansas’ Prohibition law remained poorly enforced and the sale of alcohol widespread.

“She just got tired of trying to influence local politicians into shutting down saloons that shouldn’t be open,” says Blair Tarr, a historian and curator at the Kansas Historical Society. That frustration led Nation to upgrade her tools, exchanging the rod for her iconic hatchet.

That hatchet was Nation’s most visible weapon, but it was not her most powerful one. “I think she knew very well how to get public attention to her,” says Tarr. “She saw anything as a possibility just to get the word out.”

From the first, she worked to turn her name into her brand. Nation’s first name was initially ambiguously spelled, sometimes written as Carry and others as Carrie. Realizing the marketing potential, Nation started spelling her name Carry A. Nation as she hoped to carry a nation to Prohibition. Her ability as a self-promoter was extensive: She traveled the country on speaking tours; authored the 1904 autobiography, The Use and the Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation; published newsletters; and sold photographs and hatchet-shaped stick pins as souvenirs (with the merchandise proceeds paying for “lodging, transportation, meals, and occasionally a fine,” says Tarr).

Nation’s tactics and marketing drew their own fair share of detractors—and supporters. At a time when women were often wholly dependent on their husbands, Nation’s smashings and newsletters empowered women.

Nation’s support for Prohibition was more intersectional than is often recognized. The St. Louis Dispatch quoted Nation as saying, “If I could vote, I wouldn’t smash.” For Nation, the cause of Prohibition was much larger than stopping the sale of alcohol—it was a battle for women’s rights.