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.