Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940 (Gender Relations in the American Experience) - Hardcover

Murdock PhD, Professor Catherine Gilbert

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40 ratings by Goodreads

9780801859403: Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940 (Gender Relations in the American Experience)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801859409 ISBN 13: 9780801859403

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998

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The period of prohibition, from 1919 to 1933, marks the fault line between the cultures of Victorian and modern America. In Domesticating Drink, Murdock argues that the debates surrounding alcohol also marked a divide along gender lines. For much of early American history, men generally did the drinking, and women and children were frequently the victims of alcohol-associated violence and abuse. As a result, women stood at the fore of the temperance and prohibition movements and, as Murdock explains, effectively used the fight against drunkenness as a route toward political empowerment and participation. At the same time, respectable women drank at home, in a pattern of moderation at odds with contemporaneous male alcohol abuse.

During the 1920s, with federal prohibition a reality, many women began to assert their hard-won sense of freedom by becoming social drinkers in places other than the home. Murdock's study of how this development took place broadens our understanding of the social and cultural history of alcohol and the various issues that surround it. As alcohol continues to spark debate about behaviors, attitudes, and gender roles, Domesticating Drink provides valuable historical context and important lessons for understanding and responding to the evolving use, and abuse, of drink.

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From the Publisher:

"Murdock's contributions to the social history of alcohol are many . . . perhaps most significantly, she reveals the crucial role that respectable female drinkers played in both achieving and dismantling the Eighteenth Amendment."—Madelon Powers, American Historical Review

"Murdock writes the history of prohibition and repeal, and also of American drinking habits, as women's history. she argues that women's drinking had a positive effect: it domesticated the male use of alcohol."—Lowell Edmunds, Social History of Alcohol Review

"One of the pleasures of Domesticating Drink is that it inspires renewed appreciation of the WCTU: through propaganda and their own activist example, members succeeded—not in banning booze, but in shifting the balance of power between the sexes."—Phyllis Eckhaus, Women's Review of Books

"Murdock deftly interweaves the histories of temperance, drinking customs and women's rights. Her insightful and fluently-written synthesis will enlighten the general reader and compel the attention of specialists in a variety of disciplines."—Jack Blocker, author of American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform and "Give to the Winds Thy Fears": The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874.

About the Author:

Catherine Gilbert Murdock is a lecturer in the Growth and Structure of Cities Program at Bryn Mawr College.

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