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.

Read More

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. 

Read More

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

Read More

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/

Read More

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

Read More

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).

Read More

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

Read More

Gender, social class and contemporary (non)drinking practices in Australia seminar

Gender, social class and contemporary (non)drinking practices in Australia 

Tuesday 28th March 7-8pm Eastern Australian Time / 9-10am British Summer Time  (online)

The Sobriety, Abstinence and Moderation Cluster and Women and Alcohol Cluster invite you to join us for an online seminar exploring themes of gender, social class and contemporary (non)drinking practices with a particular focus on the Australian context:

 

 

Programme:

 

Amy Pennay (Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, La Trobe University Australia)

A cross-national qualitative analysis of gender amidst declining youth drinking

Significant declines in drinking among young people have been recorded in many high-income countries over the past 20 years. This analysis aimed to provide insight into whether and how gender might be implicated in declining youth drinking, with a focus on women’s data. Interview data from four independent qualitative studies from Australia, Denmark, Sweden and the UK were analysed. We found that women and states of intoxication were pejoratively described in gendered terms (e.g., bitchy, hysterical). Non- and light-drinking on the other hand offered opportunities for expressing alternate and desirable configurations of femininities. Our findings offer insight into how young people’s enactions of gender are embedded in, and evolve alongside, these large declines in youth drinking.

 

Belinda Lunnay (Research Centre for Public Health Equity and Human Flourishing, Torrens University Australia)

“Glorified cordial”: How social class distinctions are re-made through women’s perspectives on no and low alcohol product consumption

Women’s alcohol consumption during midlife (aged 45-64) is continually increasing and poses threats to disease prevention. Public health approaches designed to curb consumption are not taking effect. We looked to innovate responses by observing the momentum of the ‘sober curious’ wellness movement among younger populations and we wondered what factors impact women’s preparedness to reduce alcohol and can the sober curious movement be leveraged to support women with making alcohol reductions? Globally, ‘sober curious’ movements are rapidly gaining popularity. They promote sustained reduced drinking lifestyles as socially desirable. An important scaffolding to the movement is a rapidly growing range of no- or low-alcohol (NoLo) products now available in bars, bottle shops and supermarkets. Our research explored women’s perceptions about consuming NoLos in accordance with their different life chances and reasons for drinking. I will share data collected through 27 open-ended interviews with ‘sober-curious’ Australian women (45-64 years) from different social class positions (working vs middle/affluent) in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Applying Bourdieu’s relational model of social class, we found NoLos provide middle/affluent women with an alcohol alternative that supports reductions. These women described drinking as a celebration and to achieve social connections, and how in these contexts, NoLos have social value. They represent ‘wellness’ and are a positive and desirable ‘good’, albeit without psychoactive effects. NoLos are also highly commodified products that we found operate as symbolic capital, conferring status and privilege upon middle/affluent class women who have the cultural ‘know how’ to select particular brands, to purchase and to drink them. On the other hand, working class women, who drink to cope with difficult lives and to relieve boredom, stress or loneliness, questioned the advantages of drinking NoLos - “I would just drink water” (one working class woman said) rather than “glorified cordial” (one affluent class woman’s description of NoLos). We found NoLos are unaffordable, and not worthwhile for this group – they are no help with feelings of coping, nor are there gains to be made in terms of recognition of cultural capital and social class mobility. For this group alternative features of the sober curious movement need to be explored for leverage potential in supporting women to reduce alcohol. I will discuss options.

Kristen Foley (Torrens University Australia)

Social class and the actualities of self-making via alcohol consumption, stockpiling, happiness and wellness during the 2020 crisis lockdowns for Australian women in midlife

COVID-19 lockdowns to mitigate viral spread during 2020 confined people to their homes for reasons except ‘essential services’ – which in Australia included to purchase alcohol. Before the pandemic, we interviewed 50 women 2017-2019 about alcohol consumption, and 40 agreed to reinterview during 2020 lockdowns (n=90 interviews). Women were aged 45-64 and represented different social class positions informed by Bourdieusian logic. Data analysis used pre-coding, conceptual/thematic categorisation, and theoretical interpretation. This presentation collates our published work by theme – alcohol consumption and reduction, stockpiling, happiness and wellness – in relation to social class and the actualities for consuming alcohol as part of ‘self-making’. During the pandemic, women in middle class positions worked dutifully to pursue happiness and stay well, stockpiling the most alcohol of women in all classes. Women in working class positions described that drinking provided emotional relief in lieu of happiness and was one of few ‘tools’ that kept them ‘well’, although limited economic capital precluded stockpiling. Women in affluent class positions had well-stocked cellars before the pandemic emerged, so needed to stockpile less, but their narratives indicated they could access alternatives to alcohol consumption to pursue wellness and happiness. Relationships to alcohol therefore took form according to cultural and neoliberal imperatives to ‘make selves’ that are well and happy despite pandemic uncertainty; yet the opportunities to do so segmented commensurate to the capital available to women. Approaches that seek to support women with alcohol reduction must consider these important social class-based differences in women’s self-making and the alternatives to alcohol women can access.

 

Discussant: Filip Djordjevic (La Trobe University Australia)

 

Please contact emily.nicholls@york.ac.uk if you have any queries or require the Zoom link. 

 

Read More

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. 

Read More

Team meeting in Glasgow (2022)

Team meeting

Glasgow

1-5 August 2022 

The team behind the NCN funded project, ‘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’ met for their first in-person team meeting in August 2022. We divided our time between discussing the project and working together in a number of archives.

The team meeting was divided into two parts. In the morning, we focussed on discussing the methodology we are developing and had a useful discussion with our mentor, psychiatrist Iain Smith, on medical approaches to women’s drinking in the 19th Century and beyond. In the afternoon, we invited a selection of local scholars from the DSN Women and Alcohol cluster to join us. This gave us the opportunity to share our progress on the project to date and to find out more about their ongoing and related work. These useful conversations were continued over drinks and dinner at the famous Ubiquitous Chip. We examined a range of sources from two archives while we were in Glasgow. We spent two days at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons with their knowledgeable and helpful archivist, Ross MacGregor to unearth some of the gems they have in their stores which have not yet been digitised including papers and artefacts from the famous Glasgow police surgeon, William Mcewan. We spent a further two days in the Glasgow City Archives based at Mitchell Library looking through the undigitised notes from local inebriate asylums and other local hospitals with the assistance of several of their brilliant and helpful archivists. Overall, it was an inspiring and stimulating trip and we are grateful to the NCN for funding this project and helping to bring us together.

Read More

“Researching 'Drunkenness, Compulsion and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.’” Women and Alcohol cluster seminar

 

Women and Alcohol Research Cluster is delighted to announce our next online seminar 

“Researching 'Drunkenness, Compulsion and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.’”

 

It will take place on 10 November 2022 at 12.00 midday UK time online (zoom - link to be circulated)

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

Programme:

dr Lucy Cogan (University of Galway)  “Researching 'Drunkenness, Compulsion and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.’”

It has long been acknowledged that the depictions of debauched lords in Maria Edgeworth’s writings on the eighteenth-century Irish elite are soaked in references to alcohol. However, until now little attention has been paid to the distinctly medical understanding of the harms caused by alcohol that characterises these works. For the first time, this essay draws out the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s theory of ebrietas on Edgeworth’s portrayal of the issues surrounding alcohol among her class and considers how she adapts Darwin’s ideas to the Irish context, where concerns around drunkenness cut across charged ideas of sectarian identity, class and political power. 

Read More

'Online Alcohol Recovery & Sobriety Groups' Women and Alcohol & SAM cluster seminar

 
Women and Alcohol Research Cluster  in collaboration with the Sobriety, Abstinence and Moderation cluster (SAM) are delighted to announce our next online seminar 

'Online Alcohol Recovery & Sobriety Groups' 

It will take place on Thursday 30 June 2022 at 12.00 midday GMT on Zoom

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

Programme:

Sally Sanger, University of Sheffield

Women and online alcohol recovery groups: conformity and empowerment 

Sally will explore gender-related findings from a study of alcohol online recovery support groups. She will draw on an analysis of forum posts and interviews to discuss users' (sometimes surprising) assumptions about gender in the groups. The talk will touch on issues such as motherhood, female ageing, and society’s view of female drinking, and will speculate as to why online alcohol support groups seem to attract so many women. 

 

Claire Davey, Canterbury Christ Church University

‘Goodbye mindless drinking and hello mindful living’: Sobriety as gendered self-care?  

Claire will share some of her emerging research findings and explore how contemporary sober women, within online sobriety communities, reframe their sobriety as a form of self-care, and position sobriety as a tool for their health, development, and empowerment. This presentation will tease out some of the connections between feminism, gender and self-care, through the lens of sobriety, and draw from a variety of sources, including posts from social media platforms, observational data, and interview transcripts.  

Read More

'Policing women's bodies' new Women and Alcohol cluster seminar

Women and Alcohol Research Cluster is delighted to announce our next online seminar will be a roundtable on 

'Policing women's bodies'. 

It will take place on Monday 13 December 2021 at 12.00 midday GMT on Zoom

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

Panelists include: 

Laura Fenton, University of Sheffield and University of Manchester

Laura Fenton is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, where she works on the  Youth Drinking in Decline project, and at the University of Manchester, where she is conducting research for the Austerity and Altered Lifecourses project. Laura completed her PhD in sociology in 2018. Her thesis investigated the drinking biographies of three generations of British women born between the 1940s and '90s. Laura's research interests include gender, youth, lifecourse, alcohol and biographical methods. 

Iain Smith, University of Glasgow and NHS Forth Valley

Dr. Smith has specialised in the field of addiction psychiatry as a Consultant for 29 years now and as well as maintaining a busy clinical practice, has been closely involved with training on alcohol-related topics for both medical students and postgraduate doctors and other health professionals, particularly in the context of psychiatric training. He was awarded a Wellcome Clinician Short-Term Fellowship, which was held at the University of Glasgow Centre for History of Medicine for 4 months in late 2009 studying the history of Scottish Inebriate Reformatories,with mainly women being sent for ”reform”. This work has continued - along with other strands-in the form of M.D. research, 2010-2018.M.D. awarded 2018  

Craig Stafford, University of Liverpool Staffordshire University, School of Law, Policing and Forensics

Craig Stafford gained his PhD from University of Liverpool in 2019. His research interests include the policing of women for drunkenness in Victorian Lancashire. He currently teaches History at University of Liverpool and Staffordshire University.

Cristiana Vale Pires, Catholic University of Portugal 

Cristiana Vale Pires graduated in psychology and holds an MSc and PhD in Anthropology. Currently, she is a lecturer and PostDoc researcher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the Catholic University of Portugal. She is a founding member of the NGO Kosmicare (harm reduction targeting people who use drugs in nightlife and other recreational environments) and manager of the European project Sexism Free Night analysing and responding to the intersections between drug use in nightlife environments and sexualized violence.

Read More

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

 

Read More