Domesticating drink

The sale and consumption of alcohol was one of the most divisive issues confronting America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to many historians, the period of its prohibition, from 1919 to 1933, marks the fault line between the cultures of Victorian and modern America. In Domesticating Drink, Murdock argues that the debates surrounding prohibition also marked a divide along gender lines. For much of early American history, men generally did the drinking, and women and children were frequently the victims of alcohol-associated violence and abuse. As a result, women stood at the fore of the temperance and prohibition movements (Carrie Nation being the crusade's icon) and, as Murdock explains, effectively used the fight against drunkenness as a route toward political empowerment and participation. At the same time, respectable women drank at home, in a pattern of moderation at odds with contemporaneous male alcohol abuse. Though abstemious women routinely criticized this moderate drinking, scholars have overlooked its impact on women's and prohibition history. During the 1920s, with federal prohibition a reality, many women began to assert their hard-won sense of freedom by becoming social drinkers in places other than the home. By the 1930s, the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform was one of the most important repeal organizations in the country. Murdock's study of how this development took place broadens our understanding of the social and cultural history of alcohol and the various issues that surround it.