Domesticating drink

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

The sale and consumption of alcohol was one of the most divisive issues confronting America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to many historians, the period of its 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 prohibition 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 (Carrie Nation being the crusade's icon) 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. Though abstemious women routinely critici