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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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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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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CFP: Women and Alcohol.Crossing Boundaries conference

The women and alcohol project team are excited to announce a conference workshop on women and alcohol as part of the ‘Between the drunken ‘mother of destruction’ and the sober ‘angel of the house’. Hidden representations of women’s drinking in Polish and British public discourses in the second half of the 19th century’ project’. Although the project focuses on 19th C culture, the workshop will cross chronological and disciplinary boundaries. 

This conference workshop will take place at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw on 25 and 26th July 2023. There will also be the opportunity to attend a special workshop by historian and psychiatrist, Dr Iain Smith, on finding and using medical sources on the afternoon of 24th July 2023. 

The conference workshop will be designed to encourage conversations across a range of academic and cultural boundaries (eg. geographical, disciplinary, linguistic, chronological, etc). Many of us in drinking studies are proud of the truly interdisciplinary nature of our field. There is a building consensus that the next step for our field is to increase international cooperation and cross more boundaries. We, as a team, have found it inspiring to work with colleagues across national and linguistic boundaries and we are aware of several other teams in drinking studies who have thrived for the same reason, so this conference workshop aims to support the development of that approach in drinking studies more widely. 

As such, this conference workshop is designed to encourage more discussion and networking than more traditional models. Attendees and speakers will therefore not be required to give the usual 20-minute papers but instead, we ask you to propose: 

• themes for possible round-tables

• hands-on mini workshops

• stimulus talks (of no more than 7 minutes)

• other interactive approaches (we are open to your ideas on this)

We will also invite you to be ready to join in the wide-ranging discussions in a range of interesting and stimulating ways so if you don’t want to bring something specific, you can join in the two days as an active audience member. Some sessions will involve walking tours and museum visits and talks.

At this stage, we would like expressions of interest to get an idea of who would like to attend. Please include any ideas for the sort of session you’d like to offer, or any questions at this stage but the first thing we need to know is who would like to come so we can get an idea of numbers and the range of research interests that might be involved. 

Please e-mail Dr Dorota Dias-Lewandowska and Dr Pam Lock on dsnwomencluster@gmail.com by Friday 30 March 2023. 

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Drinking Studies Network conference "Where Are We Now?"

 

Drinking Studies Network is celebrating 10 years! To mark this anniversary DSN organize online conference "Where Are We Now?" (12-14 November 2021 on zoom). E-mail Pam Lock on drinkingstudies@gmail.com to join the network and find out how to register (joining is free!). 

Together with other members of the Women and Alcohol Research Cluster, we will present a panel of research entitled Shameless? Pleasure and Lust in Representations of Female Drinking in 19th Century Europe (Sunday 14th November 15.00-17.00).

Panel overview

Since its establishment in 2020, the women and alcohol research cluster has been bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to consider why gender matters when it comes to drinking. This panel will propose practical ways to take the step from multi-disciplinary to interdisciplinary approaches and from linguistic silos to more ambitious cross-cultural research.

Bringing together two historians and two literary scholars with examples from five European cultures, the panel will reflect on the latest developments in interdisciplinarity in drinking studies. By developing on the lively dialogue between disciplines characteristic of drinking studies as a research area, our work exemplifies the readiness of drinking studies to take the next step by sharing and mixing methodologies between disciplines.

By focusing on examples of female alcohol consumption in German, English, Polish, Russian, and Swiss fiction and press, the panel aims to establish transnational as well as transdisciplinary perspectives. The themes addressed will include public and (pseudo-)medical discourses on female drinking, gendered accounts of drinking habits and places, body politics, religious discourses, and social norms.

1. Dorota Dias-Lewandowska and Pam Lock, ‘“I did all my drinking—not being ashamed of it—at the public table”: Challenging cultural and linguistic boundaries to re-frame approaches to female drinking’

This paper will present the early findings from our NCN funded project on ‘Hidden representations of women’s drinking in Polish and British public discourses in the second half of the 19th century’. We will showcase how this project was developed to answer two specific challenges in drinking studies and to experiment with new methodologies to address them. The first relates specifically to the study of women and alcohol in the nineteenth century. Until recently, the focus has been on excessive drinking and sobriety. Recent research by Jen Wallis and David Beckingham on secret female drinking and by Paul Jennings and Thora Hands on ‘normal’ female drinking demonstrates that it is time to nuance this often binary approach. The second is a more general challenge in the humanities; the isolation of research into linguistic silos. We will share how this project will compare female drinking practices in Polish and British cultures using modern discourse analysis software. Given the nature of our sources, which are likely to be short and sometimes coded, this approach is ideal for both the material and the linguistic challenge we aim to mitigate. We will introduce you to a selection of examples from our new database: the ordinary women who warm their beer at the end of a working day, or sip their wine with friends; the women who have until now been hidden by the monstrous shadows of the ‘mother of destruction’ and the ‘angel of the house’.

2. Vanessa Höving, ‘With Pleasure. Female Drinking and Narratological Lust for Misery in Gotthelf’s Alcohol Literature’

Under the pseudonym Jeremias Gotthelf, Protestant minister Albert Bitzius (1797-1854) entered the German-speaking literary canon. Predominantly set in peasant Switzerland, his novels and stories denote Gotthelf as a regional writer whose sociocritical, didactical, and pedagogical approach is also articulated in numerous calendar and journal publications. Some of Gotthelf’s early texts deal with the so-called ‘spirits misery’ among rural populations. Posing as milieu-studies of drinking behaviours, perils and downfalls, these texts are read as lucid warnings even by contemporary physicians. Diverting from this line of reception, my paper focuses on narratological settings and their connection to public enlightenment and didactics. The well-established religious discourse and the specifically gendered approach of Gotthelf’s texts concern both female body politics and the Swiss nation’s body, linking female drinking to national wellbeing or demise. However, my paper argues that such representations of female drinking disguise a voyeuristic interest in alcohol-induced sexuality including a narratological lust for female misery and death. I will explore how this setting reflects on an obscene underside of popular enlightenment and didactics, and how Gothelf’s texts accentuate the role of alcohol as a factor of 'Produktionsästhetik' ['aesthetics of production'].

3. Mareen Heying, ‘Pleasure and morality. The female “drunkard” in late 19th century Germany fiction and art’

To better understand female alcohol consumption, historians need to question what, when, where and with whom women drank and how the consumption of alcohol has been gendered. To do so, traditional ‘historical’ documents are not sufficient and it is therefore imperative to consider additional sources, such as literature and art, to examine the social reality of female drinking. In this paper, I will take an interdisciplinary approach and consider three examples from German literature and art. The first two are literary examples that address private (female) drinking in moral terms: ‘The satire Die fromme Helene’ by Wilhelm Busch (1872), in which Busch shows religious and bourgeoise hypocrisy by portraying a bourgeoise woman who excessively turns to alcohol and later drunkenly kills herself in a fire; and Gerhart Hauptmann’s social drama Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) in which the downfall of a family of farmers due to alcohol abuse is put upon stage. In contrast, the artist Heinrich Zille– known for his depictions of people from the working class and their daily struggles –made several drawings showing women publicly drinking and having fun in pubs without putting his subjects to shame. Taken together the sources show how female drinking in the late 19th century was regarded as shameful in Germany and how women nonetheless consumed alcohol shamelessly. I will show how female drinking spaces and social norms on female drinking can be better analyzed by considering historical sources with examples from literature and art.

4. Anna Smelova, “Non-Women’s Business”: Gender, Alcohol, and the Control of Sexuality in the Temperance Movement in Late Imperial Russia

The 19th century witnessed the rise of various reformist movements at both international and local levels, such as clean-living crusades, public health campaigns, and temperance activism. Anti-alcoholic activities in the United States and European countries influenced ‘the invention’ of alcoholism as a social problem in the Russian empire. Orthodox priests and doctors played a leading role in the anti-alcohol campaign in Russia, promoting their ideas about family, order, and morality.

This paper seeks to analyze the gender roles and participation of women in the Russian temperance movement. I will specifically focus on the First All-Russian Anti-Alcohol Congress (1910) case study, which created a rare opportunity for a woman in late imperial Russia to speak out on socially and politically important issues. One of the most influential activists was Evgenia Chebysheva-Dmitrieva — a feminist and head of the Society for Combating Alcoholism of Women and Children. Like female activists abroad, Chebysheva-Dmitrieva sought to draw attention to women's issues and increase the voice and role of women in the Russian public sphere. This paper argues that the discourse on sobriety was politicized in late imperial society and served as a platform for various social groups to pursue their views and interests. Additionally, although the role of women in daily life was recognized and male drunkenness was widely condemned by most temperance activists, raising the topic of granting or expanding rights was a rare occurrence in the male-oriented temperance rhetoric under the old regime. 

Drinking Studies Network Conference 2021

Where are we now? The DSN at 10

12-14 November 2021, Virtual Conference Programme

*All times are in GMT* *All sessions will be held via Zoom* 

Friday 12th November

18:00 – 20:30: ‘Alcohol as Medicine: A Roundtable Discussion’

Special event to mark the new partnership between the DSN and the journal SHAD. Introduction: David Herzberg (SHAD), Mark Hailwood & Deborah Toner (DSN)

Chair: Lucas Richert

Speakers: Stephen Mawdsley, Iain Smith, Erica Wald, Jennifer Wallis, Ryosuke Yokoe

Followed by a ‘Make your own’ Drinks’ Reception and Demonstration

Annemarie McAllister and Anistatia Miller

Saturday 13th November

09:45 – 10:00: Introductory Remarks

Mark Hailwood, Pam Lock, and Deborah Toner

10:00 – 12:00: Drinking Places Research Cluster: Which Way to The Pub? Chair: Paul Jennings

Drinking Places Research, 2010-2021

James Brown and James Kneale

The Moon Under Water Revisited: Orwell, war and the imaginary pub

Phil Mellows

‘To the Industrial Zone!’: An Autoethnography of Craft Beer Spaces in a Pandemic

Sam Goodman

Recent work on contemporary pubs: a review and discussion

Claire Markham

12:00 – 13:00: Lunch

13:00 – 14:30: Brewers and Drinkers Chair: Dan Malleck

Minority women and informal labour: The study of the ongoing alcohol brewings in Manipur

Lyna H. Misao

14:30 – 15:00: Break

15.00 – 17.00: Time and Temporalities Research Cluster: Time at the Bar Chair: James Kneale

Introduction to the Cluster

Steven Earnshaw

Calling Time on E.P. Thompson

Mark Hailwood

Melmotte in Space and Time: Chronotopes and Alcohol in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now

Pam Lock

How Old is a Merry Drinker?

Steven Earnshaw

Family time: alcohol, family stories and the Intergenerational Self

Laura Fenton

17:00 – 19:00: Dinner Time

19:00 – 20:00: Online Social Virtual Drinking Workshop Susan Boyle

Meet the Craft & Artisanal Cluster! Launch event

Robert Cole, Braden Neihart, and Nadine Waehning

After Party at The Dog and Salty Nun (the DSN’s virtual pub)

Feminist Ferment: Craft brewers and gendered environments in the United States

Delorean Wiley and Colleen C. Myles

Young people's drinking choices in the Italian night settings: spaces and tactics

Franca Beccaria

Sunday 14th November

10:00 – 12:00: Sobriety, Abstinence and Moderation Research Cluster Panel:

Last orders? Exploring abstinence, sobriety and (non)drinking in the United Kingdom and beyond

Chair: Jodie McGarry

The role of different health behaviours in the decline in youth drinking

Abigail Stevely

‘You can be a hybrid when it comes to drinking’: ‘alcohol-free’ drinks and everyday (non)drinking

Emily Nicholls

Sober and Social? Alcohol abstinence, femininities and feminism within online sobriety communities and on social media

Claire G Davey

“Drinking hid my autism, even from me”: what analysis of sobriety memoirs and the writing of autistic women reveals about autistic masking and alcohol-use

Chelsey Flood

12:00 – 13:00: Lunch

13:00 – 14:30: Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity Chair: Tyler Rainford

Alcohol, Slavery and Race in Brazil during the Long Nineteenth Century

Lucas Brunozi Avelar and Deborah Toner

What Happened at María’s House: Conflict, Community, and the Criminalisation of Tepache in Early Colonial Mexico

Natasha Bailey

The Golden Age of the American Cocktail and the German Diaspora

Anistatia Miller

14:30 – 15:00: Break

15:00 – 17:00: Women and Alcohol Research Cluster: Shameless? Pleasure and Lust in Representations of Female Drinking in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Chair: Stella Moss

‘I did all my drinking—not being ashamed of it—at the public table’: Challenging cultural and linguistic boundaries to re-frame approaches to female drinking

Dorota Dias-Lewandowska and Pam Lock

With Pleasure: Female Drinking and Narratological Lust for Misery in Gotthelf’s Alcohol Literature

Vanessa Höving

Pleasure and morality: The female ‘drunkard’ in late 19th century Germany fiction and art

Mareen Heying

‘Non-Women’s Business’: Gender, Alcohol, and the Control of Sexuality in the Temperance Movement in Late Imperial Russia

Anna Smelova

17:00 – 17:30: Concluding Remarks

 

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Intoxicating Spaces: Global and Comparative Perspectives - online conference

The first results of our collaborative research will be presented at the forthcoming (free online) conference Intoxicating Spaces: Global and Comparative Perspectives organised by the HERA research project: Intoxicating Spaces: The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600–1850.

Our paper, on female drinking at home in 19th Century Polish and British cultures will be a part of a panel "European Drinking Spaces" (Wednesday 21 July, 4–5:30pm BST): 

Session 12: European Drinking Spaces

• Dorota Dias-Lewandowska (Polish Academy of Sciences) & Pam Lock (University of Bristol). A Woman’s Place is in the Home? Seeking the Unheard Voices of Drinking Women in Polish and British Cultures
• Alexandr Gorokhovskiy (Utrecht University) ‘Naley enim Infunde significat’: Sixteenth-Century Moscow’s Drinking Quarter and its German Dwellers
• Jenni Lares (Tampere University) House, Home, and Tavern: Places of Drinking in Seventeenth-Century Finland

The conference will be held live via Zoom. Monday 19–Wednesday 21 July 2021

Programme

Registration (free)

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