Synopses & Reviews
In this fascinating history of alcohol in postwar American culture, Lori Rotskoff draws on short stories, advertisements, medical writings, and Hollywood films to investigate how gender norms and ideologies of marriage intersected with scientific and popular ideas about drinking and alcoholism.
After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, recreational drinking became increasingly accepted among white, suburban, middle-class men and women. But excessive or habitual drinking plagued many families. How did people view the "problem drinkers" in their midst? How did husbands and wives learn to cope within an "alcoholic marriage?" And how was drinking linked to broader social concerns during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War era?
By the 1950s, Rotskoff explains, mental health experts, movie producers, and members of self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon helped bring about a shift in the public perception of alcoholism from "sin" to "sickness." Yet alcoholism was also viewed as a family problem that expressed gender-role failure for both women and men. On the silver screen (in movies such as The Lost Weekend and The Best Years of Our Lives) and on the printed page (in stories by writers such as John Cheever), in hospitals and at Twelve Step meetings, chronic drunkenness became one of the most pressing public health issues of the day.
Review
A lively account of the culture of drink--and the gendered tensions it encoded--across the twentieth century. Wide-ranging, engaging, and informative.
(Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America)
Review
"Lori Rotskoff, who writes wonderfully well, has filled a blank in the (gendered) social history of American drinking and sobriety from Prohibition through the fifties: a subtle, engaging, and now indispensable study. (John W. Crowley, author of The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in Modernist American Fiction)"
Synopsis
A cultural history of drinking and alcoholism from Prohibition to the mid-1960s, focusing on how gender norms and ideologies of marriage shaped Americans' views and experiences of drinking.
Synopsis
A cultural history of drinking and alcoholism from Prohibition to the mid-1960s, focusing on how gender norms and ideologies of marriage shaped Americans' views and experiences of drinking.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Cultures of Drink in Prohibition and Postrepeal America
Dissolute Manhood and the Rituals of Intemperance
Righteous Womanhood and the Politics of Temperance
Depression, War, and the Rise of Social Drinking
Drink, Gender, and Sociability in the in the 1930s and 1940s
Chapter 2. Engendering the Alcoholic
From Intemperance to Alcoholism
Diagnosing the Alcoholic Man
Problem Drinkers and Returning Veterans in Postwar Popular Culture
Chapter 3. Alcoholics Anonymous and the Culture of Sobriety
The Social Foundations of Mutual Help in the 1930s and 1940s
The Early Membership of Alcoholics Anonymous
Gendered Rituals of Fellowship
Gendered Narratives of Illness and Recovery
Chapter 4. The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage
Diagnosing the Alcoholic's Wife
The Wives of AA and Al-Anon in the 1940s and 1950s
Rehabilitating the Alcoholic Marriage
Chapter 5. Drink and Domesticity in Postwar America
The Alcoholic Culture of the Postwar Suburbs
Alcohol and Family Trouble in Postwar Fiction and Popular Culture
Drinking, Consumerism, and the Cultural Significance of Alcoholism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index