Prodigal Wives: Women, Alcohol and Legal Incapacitation in Nineteenth-century Poland - Gender and History Seminar

Gender and History Seminar (hybrid) - Tuesday, 24 February 2026 at 6 pm Polish time (5 pm UK time) at the University of Warsaw Faculty of History (Former Museum Building), Room A and online

https://historia.uw.edu.pl/seminarium-historii-gender-24-lutego-2026-2/ 

Dorota Dias-Lewandowska (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences) 

"Prodigal Wives: Women, Alcohol and Legal Incapacitation in Nineteenth-century Poland". 

The talk will be commented on by David Clemis (Mount Royal University).

To obtain the link to the online meeting, please email historia.gender(at)uw.edu.pl

About the book project:

Dorota Dias-Lewandowska: "Prodigal Wives: Women, Alcohol and Legal Incapacitation in Nineteenth-century Poland"

The main sources for this study are court records of the legal incapacitation of men and women due to prodigality. In most cases (around 80–90%), drinking is cited as the primary cause of ruinous behaviour. In the book, I demonstrate how alcohol and drinking were used to discipline and empower women. I also show how, in the era of the medicalisation of drunkenness, being a habitual drunkard remained largely a social construct. My analysis focuses on partitioned Poland, particularly the Austrian-governed region of Galicia, which covers present-day southern Poland (including Krakow) and western Ukraine (including Lviv). Through microhistorical analysis, I contextualise the experiences of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish women from small villages who witnessed the abolition of serfdom, 'Galician poverty' and, ultimately, mass emigration to America within broader European and American discourses on alcohol, medicine, agency, degeneration and emancipation.

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Online seminar - Alcohol Consumption among Women Tourists, 1880-1914

Our autumn online seminar for the DSN Women and Alcohol Cluster will feature a talk by Louisa Niesen, European University Institute, Florence, Italy on 6 November 2025 at 12.00 midday (UK time) on Zoom (link available on request). 

This paper will explore alcohol consumption among Central European female tourists between 1880–1914. Drawing from ego-documents and visual representations of German-speaking female tourists, I demonstrate that alcohol consumption, often associated with male-dominated public spheres, was a widespread and normalised activity among women in semi-public and public spaces, such as trains, wine taverns, and restaurants.

Presenting several case studies, my paper investigates the purposes, scope, and conditions of these women's drinking habits. For instance, women tourists’ accounts frequently highlight drinking for pleasure and even intoxication, revealing attitudes toward alcohol that contradict the ideal of female abstinence promoted by bourgeois norms. 

I will also show how travel itself emerged as a critical factor in reshaping drinking behaviours. Drawing from practice theory, I argue that the dislocation of everyday routines during travel facilitated shifts in women’s attitudes, legitimising alcohol consumption in unfamiliar settings. Providing a comprehensive survey of the motivations, patterns, and social acceptance surrounding alcohol consumption among female travellers, my findings suggest that drinking was a regular and widely accepted aspect of middle-class women tourists’ lives, challenging prevailing assumptions of female sobriety and temperance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Louisa Niesen is a PhD researcher in history at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her dissertation examines leisure travel by train, ship, and car, exploring how material conditions and intersecting characteristics shaped Central European women's tourist practices and experiences between 1880 and 1914. Her research interests include gender history, the history of consumption and material culture, and the history of everyday life. 

Please e-mail us on dsnwomencluster@gmail.com for the link to attend. 

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Women and Alcohol: Dangerous Pleasures? 19-20 June 2025. Conference program

 

Women and Alcohol: Dangerous Pleasures?

Drinking Studies Network Women and Alcohol Cluster Conference

19-20 June 2025

Museum of Literature, Dublin

Day 1 (19 June 2025)

9.15 Introduction

9.30 Panel 1: Drinking Spaces               

• Vanessa Höving, Sober Pleasures. Renunciation and Gender in Contemporary German Life Writing, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
• Marta Ramón García, Where Women Drink: drinking spaces and female agency in Victorian Ireland, University of Oviedo, Spain
• Katie Snow, ‘We were to enjoy ourselves’: Somerville and Ross’. In the Vine Country and Female Pleasure, University College Dublin, Ireland

11.00 Break

11.15 Panel 2: Taboos

• Judith Boyle, Assessing the Impact of the Irish Equality Act on Women's Rights to Public Alcohol Consumption, Technological University Dublin, Ireland
• Sarah Fox, ‘Izzat means everything’: South Asian women’s experiences of alcohol use, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
• Geoffrey Hunt, Women, intoxicated sexualities and pleasure, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Shannon Hughes Spence, Balancing pleasure and danger in the Night Time Economy, South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland

13.00 Lunch

14.00 Panel 3: Women and Medicine

• David Clemis, ‘A vice detestable in all, but prodigious in Women’: The Moral Agency of Drunken Women in Early Modern English Law and Medicine’, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada
• Fionnula Simpson, ‘I takes what ye call wee sterics’: Female Drinkers and their Doctors in Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction (1864-1895), University College Dublin, Ireland
• Iain Smith, ‘True Alcoholic Insanity’ – A Focus on the Women in Glasgow Asylums in the Late Nineteenth Century who had their insanity attributed to Intemperance, University of Glasgow, UK
• Dan Malleck, More than a druggist's dilemma: Invalid wines and the definition of medicine during Canada's prohibition, Brock University, Canada

15.45. Break

16.00 Round table: Projects working on women & alcohol
 

Day 2 (20 June 2025)

9.30 Panel 4: Women and Alcohol in Midlife

• Antonia Lyons and Kate Kersey, ‘I don’t want to change my lovely habit of having a glass of wine’: Women at midlife, alcohol and cancer risks, University of Aukland, New Zealand
• Maree Patsouras, ‘Mummy’s little helper’: A mixed methods exploration of stress, gender norms, alcohol use and the impact of commercial interests among a sample of Australian working mothers, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
• Madeline Rowe, A qualitative exploration of women’s alcohol use and wellbeing during menopause, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

11.00 Break

11.15 Panel 5: Visualising Pleasures

• Megan Bennett, The [Un]Knowable Power of the Georgian Landlady: Art and Literature 1742-1802, University of Sheffield, UK
• Dorota Dias Lewandowska, Intoxicating landscapes. A visual representation of the drinking women's progress: from pleasurable tasting to dangerous addiction in nineteenth-century Poland, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
• Hannah Halliwell, Whose Pleasure? Solo and Sociable Drinking in Fin-de-Siècle French Art, University of Edinburgh, UK

12.45 Lunch

13.45 Panel 6: Defiant Pleasures

• Lucy Cogan, ‘A Fearless, Whiskey Drinking Virago’: The Uncontrollable Woman Drinker in Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature, University College Dublin, Ireland
• James Kneale, Secret drinking and private drinking: Jane Feast’s tragic spree on Cruikshank Road, University College London, UK
• Pam Lock, ‘[H]ave what you’re a mind to, Poll. I’m going’ to stand treat’: Women drinking for pleasure and company, University of Bristol, UK

15.15 Break

15.30 Panel 7: Women and Temperance

• Catherine Carstairs and Aidan Hughes, ‘Drinking like a girl’: Advice from Seventeen, 1970-1990, University of Guelph, Canada
• Lara Martin Lengel, Women’s Sobriety in Straight Edge: Gender and Resistance in a Subcultural Social Movement, Bowling Green State University, US
• Scott Martin, ‘Drinking Women’ and Female Influence: Explaining Women's Drunkenness in the Antebellum United States, Bowling Green State University, US

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DSN Women and Alcohol Seminar: Female Offending and the Police Courts in Victorian Lancashire

DSN Women and Alcohol Seminar

Thursday 8 May 2025, 12.00 midday (UK time), online 

(e-mail us dsnwomencluster@gmail.com to register)

Craig Stafford, Female Offending and the Police Courts in Victorian Lancashire (book under contract)

Craig Stafford will discuss his forthcoming book, and the research behind it, in a flash talk designed to inspire conversation. His book explores the relationship between women, police and magistrates with a focus on Victorian Lancashire, using the boroughs of Salford, Rochdale and Bolton as case studies. It examines the relationship between female offenders and these provincial police courts, exploring how male attitudes towards femininity and respectability influenced sentencing at summary level. With a thematic approach, it explores both criminal drunkenness and offences linked to drink, such as violence and prostitution. Despite being close neighbours, the police in each borough had different approaches towards the policing of female drunkenness, often influenced by the concerns of local elites. The study uses microhistories of key actors, including policemen, magistrates, and the women who used, or were prosecuted in, these courts to explore how these approaches differed and what the implications of such gendered attitudes were for the women and their families.

The book is part of the Trailblazers scheme, a joint initiative between the Universities of Liverpool, Salford and Lancaster. More information can be found here:

https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2025/01/28/trailblazers-announces-first-two-contracted-books/

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New article in Addiction

 

We are delighted to announce a new article was pre-released on 22 December 2024 from the Women and Alcohol project in Addiction: 

Iain Smith and Pam Lock, How did investigations into spontaneous human combustion influence alcohol medicine? An examination of the medical and literary discussions that brought the two together

This interdisciplinary collaboration between psychiatrist and historian Dr Smith, and literary scholar, Dr Lock, has resulted in an article for the humanities section of Addiction. We examined 57 'real' medical cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), and the representation of SHC in ten novels and a selection of short stories. We were intrigued by the fact that a large proportion of medical writings on alcohol in the 19th Century contained a chaper or section on SHC and that the majority of medical cases shared featured women as the victims. We concluded that the development of new theories about the action of alcohol on the body and mind appears to have been influenced by the now-discredited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea that the phenomenon of human combustion, spontaneous or not, was linked to spirit drinking. As an extreme example of the consequences of heavy drinking, spontaneous human combustion was used to underpin early theories on the clinical chemistry of alcohol.

This article is open access and can be found at https://doi-org.bris.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/add.16739

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New article in Cultural and Social History

We are delighted to share the latest article to emerge from the Women and Alcohol project published in Cultural and Social History: 

Dorota Dias-Lewandowska and Craig Stafford - Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Our aim was to show how in Victorian Britain and post-partition Poland, despite cultural, political and economic differences, there was a shared belief that women’s drinking was more harmful than men’s which prompted formal and informal methods of policing. In this article we show how control mechanisms emerged in different environments, what their motivations and effects were, and by which actors they were deployed. By cross-referencing public discourse with reformatories and courts records, we have distinguished models of policing women drinkers and show how disciplinary tools were used differently by both policers and the policed.

You can access free copies by clicking the link below:

Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century

or acces the Accepted Manuscript (AM) version here:

Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century - AM version

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CFP: “Women and Alcohol: Dangerous Pleasures?”

CFP: “Women and Alcohol: Dangerous Pleasures?”

University College Dublin, Ireland - 19-20 June 2025

Women’s pleasure has traditionally been treated as something to be contained or subjugated to responsibilities within the home and to the larger society. As such, it is often considered dangerous, to family, to community, to nation. Across the world, the disruptive potential and threat of women’s pleasure is often intertwined with alcohol. Against this background, the medicalisation of alcohol consumption further impacted societal attitudes towards women’s drinking in particular and often limiting terms. In some countries, legislation or more informal legal interventions by police, were also gendered and further policed women’s pleasures.

For this conference, co-organised by the “Drinking Cultures” project (Wellcome Trust, UCD) and the Drinking Studies Network “Women and Alcohol” cluster, we invite speakers to consider the perceived dangers of women’s drinking and drunkenness but also the pleasures associated with it. What counts as ‘dangerous’ shifts over time but constructions of harmful pleasure are usually gendered in ways that are culturally and historically specific. From the moral panic of the ruined mothers of eighteenth-century England’s gin craze to the green fairy of fin de siècle France and the ‘Shebeen Queens’ of twentieth-century South Africa, women have often been the symbolic face of society’s fears about alcohol.

We welcome proposals for traditional papers on the topics suggested below but also in innovative formats and on subjects that speak to the theme more broadly:

• Joy and pleasure
• Alcohol and affect
• Women’s abstinence, no-lo, sober-curious
• Poly substance use, abuse and addiction
• Domestic medicine, professional medicine and medicalised bodies
• Changing habits - cultural, individual, historical perspectives
• Legal and illegal drinking cultures
• Cultural attitudes towards different forms of consumption
• Drinking, drunkenness and risk-taking
• Understanding harm
• Taste, fashion and connoisseurship
• Drinking spaces & places
• Local and global perspectives
• Cross cultural comparative approaches
• Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio to dsnwomencluster@gmail.com by 13 January 2025

illustration: Ludwig Knaust, Das freche mädchen, Public domain

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Boundaries of Drinking - new research project

 

We are pleased to announce that Dorota Dias-Lewandowska, Cluster co-lead and PI of the Women and Alcohol project, has been awarded the Sonata Bis grant from the National Science Centre in Poland for the development of a new research team. Together with two post-docs, a PhD student and three co-investigators, she will work on the project "Alcohol, Sobriety and Drunkenness: Discourses on the boundaries of drinking in 19th century post-partition Poland". More information about the project and PhD/Post-doc/Co-I calls can be found on the project website.

www.boundariesofdrinking.pl

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Séminaire MALCOF - "Femmes, alcools, archives"

We would like to invite you to the next seminar of the MALCOF project: Friday 5 April 2024, de 16hr to 18hr, in the Centre Sorbonne, Marc Bloch room (17 rue de la Sorbonne) and also on zoom (e-mail us for details).

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Women and Alcohol: Crossing Boundaries conference programme

Women and Alcohol: Crossing Boundaries  

 25-27 July 2023
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences  
Aleja Solidarności 105, room 202, 2nd floor

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