Women and Alcohol seminar: dr Amy Burnett, “Early modern alewives: a history"

Our next online seminar will take place at 12.15 (UK time) on 30th October 2026 on zoom (email us for the link) featuring long-term member and recent prize winner, Dr Amy Burnett talking about her groundbreaking research on women's work in seventeenth century alehouses. Amy completed her PhD in November 2024 and since then, it has been cited as a key text in a Master's course, been requested for the UK government library, and co-won the ADHS Dissertation Prize (along with fellow winner, Dr. Taylor Dysart). In this seminar, Amy will provide an overview of some of her key arguments and hopefully leave you convinced that the early modern ale trade was, in fact, an industry of women. If you cannot attend the talk, you can follow her research at amy-burnett.co.uk and @dramyburnett on Instagram. 

“Early modern alewives: a history"

This thesis argues that the early modern Westcountry ale trade was an industry of women.

There have been no book-length studies of the female ale seller, and when she is afforded a section within a chapter on the ale trade, her work is often obscured if the historian consults licences or lists of victuallers. The sources used in this study were chosen for their ability to reveal women’s licensed and unlicensed work in alehouses and inns.

First, broadside ballads reveal how hostesses were depicted in popular culture. Historians have previously noted that ale-selling women endured negative portrayals in popular print. This thesis argues that seemingly negative portrayals also reveal women to be the managerial workers in the alehouse and inn.

This provides a foundation for chapter two, which considers probate inventories of brewers, sellers, and brewer-sellers. By the seventeenth century, these were increasingly separate occupations. While men dominated the brewing trade, women - particularly wives who were comfortably well-off - remained dominant in the selling of ale.

Petitions reveal how the licensing system did not dictate the ale trade. If a trader had a good reputation, the parish permitted them to trade. As such, ale sellers operated within a network of ‘horizontal authority’. Primarily, the working manager of the alehouse (usually a woman) needed to focus on her relationship with the community, including local authorities. The regional authorities’ relationship with the licence-holder (usually a man) was of lesser importance.

Finally, court depositions are presented as an especially strong source material for the analysis of women’s work in the ale trade. They show that the ale trade was possible without men, but impossible without women. Using a variation of the ‘verb oriented method’, court depositions show exactly what was done, when it was done, and by whom. This was an all-hours trade that relied especially on networks of women: typically, a wife stood at the helm, and was supported by daughters, female servants, female neighbours. Men’s input was limited to reprimanding criminals or entertaining male guests. As such, working in an alehouse was gender-specific - and women, particularly wives, were the ‘chiefe doers’.

 

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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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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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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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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. 

 

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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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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.

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“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. 

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'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.  

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'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.

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