Geoffrey Hunt, Benxi Zhang, Alexandra Bogren, Tamar Antin, and Margit Anne Petersen

This blog accompanies the authors’ recently published article in Cultural and Social History.

From the figure of the ‘wine mom’ to warnings about women ‘drinking like men’ and stigmatising labels such as the ‘lady lush’, contemporary language around female alcohol use is saturated with moral judgement. What appears to be concern with health or behaviour often rests on older assumptions about how women ought to drink—or whether they should drink at all. When news reports today warn of a ‘binge drinking epidemic’ among women, or when public health campaigns single out female alcohol use as a particular social crisis, they are drawing on a very old story. That story holds that women should be, by nature, sober. Our article deconstructs this myth. By tracing the history of women’s drinking in the US across four distinct periods (colonial America, the nineteenth-century temperance era, Prohibition, and the post-Prohibition eras), we show that the ‘naturally sober woman’ was not a description of reality. It was a cultural and moral construction, shaped by economic change, class anxiety, gender ideology, and state power, whose ‘legacies’ continue to structure how women’s drinking is understood and judged today.

The starting point for our argument is the work of Danish historian Sidsel Eriksen, who in 1999 demonstrated that women’s presumed sobriety in Denmark was not a reflection of actual drinking practices but a strategic ideological construct, developed by temperance reformers during industrialisation, to define femininity against a newly problematised image of male public drinking. Swedish historian Hannah Enefalk similarly showed that attitudes toward women’s alcohol use depended heavily on class position and on whether drinking took place in public or in private. Our article extends this comparative framework to the American case, asking: when, how, and for what purposes did the image of the ‘naturally sober’ woman take root in US culture? And what has it cost women, historically and today, to be measured against it?

Colonial Women: Producers, Proprietors, and Drinkers

Far from being passive bystanders to alcohol culture, women in eighteenth-century America were producers, sellers, and enthusiastic consumers of alcoholic beverages. Beer and spirits were regarded as healthful, often safer than water, and widely prescribed by doctors. In the colonial period, female brewing and distilling were ordinary extensions of domestic labour, and women commonly operated taverns and inns. In Charleston, South Carolina, women held nearly two-thirds of tavern licences in 1771. In Boston, the majority of those convicted of illegal alcohol sales were women, many of them widows and mariners’ wives for whom the informal liquor trade was a vital survival strategy.

Women also drank. Estimates suggest that by 1770, the average white woman in the Chesapeake consumed nearly two pints of hard cider daily. Yet the historical record is uneven. Women’s drinking was more likely to be private, and what we do see is heavily filtered through court records and moral commentary. Those sources reveal a double standard: a slightly intoxicated gentlewoman at a private gathering might be tolerated, even found amusing, while a working-class woman drunk in public was described as ‘animalistic’ and ‘utterly lacking in self-restraint’ (Pariseau 2006, 46). The moral condemnation of female drunkenness, in other words, was also a condemnation of class transgression.

The Temperance Era: Constructing the ‘Sober Woman’ as Moral Ideal

The nineteenth century is where the myth of the naturally ‘sober women’ was forged most deliberately. The rise of the temperance movement, and especially the creation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874, positioned women as moral guardians of the home, defined against the destructive figure of the drinking man. Temperance discourse ‘linked women with abstention from alcohol and linked men with drinking’ (Sholtis, 2020, 29), and this gendered binary became embedded in law: from the 1850s onward, sex-specific regulations began restricting women’s access to saloons, effectively inscribing in statute the idea that a respectable woman did not belong in public drinking spaces.

Yet the full picture is more complicated than this narrative suggests. Many working-class and immigrant women continued to drink publicly and privately throughout the temperance era. Irish widows ran ‘shebeens,’ kitchen grog shops, as community resources and sources of income (Murdock, 1998, 74). The Union Signal reported five thousand women working in the liquor business in Chicago alone in 1893. And plenty of middle-class women who had no interest in temperance simply moved their drinking indoors. Cookbooks and etiquette manuals told them how to serve alcohol at home while keeping up appearances, and the decanter became a symbol of feminine refinement instead of moral failure. In the end, the temperance era did not stop women from drinking. It just made them do it more quietly.

Prohibition: The Paradox of the ‘New Woman’

The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 was the temperance movement’s greatest triumph, and also its most ironic unintended consequence. Prohibition gave rise to speakeasies that, for the first time, welcomed women as patrons alongside men. The ‘New Woman’ of the 1920s, politically enfranchised, economically active, and newly visible in urban nightlife, claimed the right to drink as part of a broader assertion of personal freedom. Young women in speakeasies, contemporaries observed, ‘viewed drinking as an act of rebellion’ (McClellan, 2017, 58).

This was a historical shift, but it was also a partial and unstable one. Class continued to shape what kinds of female drinking were legible as modern freedom rather than moral failure. Working-class women’s presence in commercial leisure was viewed with suspicion by middle-class reformers, who worried that practices like ‘treating’ (accepting drinks from men in exchange for company) were gateways to sexual impropriety. At the same time, women entered the illicit economy of Prohibition as bootleggers, often framed as respectable mothers acting out of economic necessity, which gave them a degree of invisibility that male bootleggers lacked. And women also organised to repeal Prohibition: the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, with over a million members, played a pivotal role in ending the Eighteenth Amendment, demonstrating that women’s relationship to alcohol politics was never reducible to the temperance narrative.

Post-Prohibition Domesticity: Cocktails, Hostesses, and Hidden Standards

Once Prohibition was over, drinking moved off the street and into the living room. The cocktail became the symbol of respectable middle-class entertaining, and women were expected to be its curators. Not as people who drank for pleasure, but as ‘model wives’ and ‘good hostesses’ who knew how to mix a good drink and keep the glasses full (Murdock, 1998; Pereira-Alvares, 2016). Cookbooks and magazines advised women how to do this well. The cocktail also gave women a way into drinking culture that did not feel too transgressive. Nobody raised an eyebrow at a woman with a martini. A whiskey was a different story.

That said, there were clear boundaries. Women who drank beyond what was considered appropriate faced a very different kind of judgement than men in the same situation. Too much drinking made a woman sexually suspect and a moral failure. The Distilled Spirits Institute went so far as to ban women from appearing in alcohol advertising altogether, a rule that stayed in place from 1937 all the way to 1988, even as women were doing most of the work of keeping alcohol central to home life. The post-war era makes the logic of the ‘naturally sober’ myth unusually visible. Moderate, private, hostess-appropriate drinking was welcomed. Anything beyond that was treated as a failure of womanhood.

Legacies and What They Mean Today

By organising this analysis across four periods, we aim to show that the ‘naturally sober’ woman is not a biological fact but a historical residue. We call this a ‘legacy’: a moral and cultural arrangement that outlives its originating conditions and continues to structure how women’s drinking is perceived and regulated. Understanding this legacy helps explain why women’s drinking today so often provokes concern, correction, or condemnation—and why those responses tell us more about inherited moral expectations than about alcohol itself, despite its very real health risks.

Our article also insists on women’s agency within these constraints. Women were not passive recipients of temperance ideology or domestic prescription. They brewed beer, ran taverns, defied Prohibition, campaigned for repeal, and found ways to drink, for pleasure, for sociability, for relief, in every period we examine. The aim of recovering this history is to understand why, even now, the question of whether women should drink, how much, and where, remains so freighted with moral meaning.

References:

McClellan, Michelle L. Lady Lushes: Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern America. Rutgers University Press, 2017.

Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940. JHU Press, 1998.

Pariseau, Sarah Elizabeth King. Powerful Spirits: Social Drinking in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. 2006.

Pereira-Alvares, Rochelle. “Make Any Occasion a Special Event: Hospitality, Domesticity and Female Cordial Consumption in Magazine Advertising, 1950-1969.” In Women in Magazines. Routledge, 2016.

Sholtis, Elizabeth. “Shaking Things Up: The Influence of Women on the American Cocktail.” Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review 9, no. 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.21061/vtuhr.v9i0.4.