Gender, Drink and Drugs

Maryon McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

Why do so many people feel compelled to drink alcohol or take drugs? And why do so many men drink and so many women refrain? Using ideas from social anthropology, this book attempts to provide a novel answer to these questions. The introduction surveys both gender and addiction. It points out that we cannot say what men or women are really like, in any culturally innocent sense, for gender is always, even in the realm of biology, a cultural matter. The ethnographic chapters, ranging from Ancient Rome to modern Japan, similarly suggest how any substance - from alcohol to tea to heroin - inevitably takes its meaning or reality in the cultural system in which it exists.This book will be of interest to medical anthropologists, medical sociologists, anyone with an interest in the contemporary direction of anthropology as well as those working in the fields of alcohol and addiction.

1
Women and Alcohol: The Emergence of a Risk Group

Betsy Thom

Women – A ‘High-Risk’ Group?

At different historical moments, and in cultural contexts as diverse as the Roman Empire and Victorian England, women's alcohol use has emerged, disappeared and re-emerged as a focus of public concern. The past two decades have witnessed a new wave of anxiety over women's drinking and in a 1990 WHO publication entitled Alcohol-related problems in high risk groups, each of the six European countries contributing to the publication considered women, as a group, at high risk of developing alcohol-related problems (Plant 1990).

The rationale for the shift in women's status over the last twenty years from non-problematic and low-risk to problematic and high-risk is unclear. Statistically-minded countries tend to report much lower rates of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems among women when compared with men (Plant 1990; Plant 1990a; Roman 1988) and although women's alcohol consumption seems to have risen since the 1950s, the validity of categorising women as 'high-risk' on the basis of consumption figures and rates of alcohol-related harm has often been challenged (e.g. Ahlstrom 1983; Fillmore 1984; Vogt 1984). Theories that changes in the drinking habits of women were leading to a convergence between male and female consumption patterns and a rise in alcohol-related problems found little support in a recent international review which concluded that: 'On the contrary, major gender differences appear to be evident and to be persisting in a large number of varied national and cultural contexts. Evidence from countries in which several surveys have been conducted at different times does not suggest that the overall pattern of alcohol use amongst women has changed very greatly during the past twenty years' (Plant 1990a:7).

Recent research in the medical field has indicated that women may be physiologically more at risk than men of developing alcohol-related problems and there has long been recognition that drinking during pregnancy may harm the foetus. But the evidence for physiological harm is still often unclear and was certainly not available to those who debated the issue of women's drinking in Victorian times (see Camberwell Council on Alcoholism 1980; Roman 1988). Even in the case of foetal damage, where there has been greater research effort, the results are not always conclusive (Plant 1985).

When we weigh up the evidence on consumption and harm, it is clear that neither reports of how much alcohol women are consuming nor the possibility that women are more vulnerable than men to the effects of alcohol are sufficient to explain why, at a particular point in time, women's alcohol use ceases to be a private matter and becomes defined as a social problem. This chapter suggests that explanations for the prominence bestowed on women's drinking in various epochs are to be found in contemporary political and social circumstances and in ideas concerning gender and women's position in society, rather than in any 'neutral' or 'scientific' evidence of women's misuse of alcohol¹. The focus here is on the factors which resulted in the emergence of women as a risk group in modern Britain, and more specifically in England. Some comparison with the late Victorian era (approximately 1870 to 1920) is instructive, and some points about that period are included here. This comparison highlights the way in which the modern definition of women's drinking as a social problem has emerged from a very different social and ideological context from that which gave rise to concern with women's drinking in the nineteenth century.

The Nineteenth Century – A Eugenic Concern

In England, debate over women's drinking was prominent in scientific journals, popular literature and Temperance tracts during the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth. It was linked with the major concerns of that era – a declining rate of population growth, high infant mortality and an unhealthy working class, all of which were believed to threaten both the quality of the national 'stock' and the supremacy of the English abroad.

In the search for explanations and solutions, women became the focal point for many of the proposed measures to counteract the increasing 'degeneracy of the race'. Women's drinking habits, along with a whole range of female behaviours and working-class life styles, became the object of reforming zeal among the emerging groups of health professionals, charitable societies and ladies' organisations. The promotion of temperance took its place in a long list of reforms targeted on women — including infant feeding, hygiene, physical education, cookery, the provision of clean milk and involvement in paid employment (Davin 1978). Members of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, founded in 1884, were prominent in bringing alcohol to the fore in discussions of national efficiency, providing evidence of the degenerative effects of alcohol to the 1904 Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration and, in accordance with prevailing ideologies, focusing attention on the relationship between female inebriety, child welfare and racial degeneration (Berridge 1990).

Papers written at the turn of the century claimed 'strong evidence to show that alcoholism is spreading at an alarming rate among females' (Kelynack 1902). Typically, no figures were offered in support of the contention; rather, observations of changing patterns of social behaviour were provided as evidence:

Girls and women of the labouring class now openly throng our public houses and drinking saloons. The 'ladies bar' is becoming a recognised resort...it is quite customary for women to meet in the afternoons for beer and gossip. Confectioners' shops, restaurants and various so-called refreshment houses offer ready means whereby women of the well-to-do class may obtain almost unlimited supplies of alcohol... (Kelynack 1902:197).

Young girls were alleged to be indulging in drinking and smoking (see White Ribbon 1905) and there was a continuing outcry over the employment of young women as barmaids and the subsequent decline of many into alcoholism (Scharlieb 1907). Women were regarded as being particularly at risk of succumbing to temptation and of drinking immoderately both because they suffered from 'an inherent vulnerability of the nervous tissues' which lowered their resistance to alcohol, and because alcohol provided a support in 'these days of incessant activity' when girls and women were 'subjected to the strain of competitive examinations, the excitement of society life or the worries of domestic duties' (Kelynack 1902:199-200).

There were close links between members of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, of the Temperance Movement, of the Eugenic Movement and of the infant welfare movement. Many of the doctors, medical officers of health, health visitors and philanthropic gentry who presided over the voluntary societies belonged to more than one group within the different movements. Dr Peiris, for instance, whose work included a publication on Racial Poisons and How to Combat Them, was also the author of Alcohol and Child Welfare (1928) and a member of both the Society for the Study of Inebriety and the Eugenic Society. Dr T.N.Kelynack, editor of Child Welfare Annual (1916) and a leading figure in the Society for the Study of Inebriety, couched his arguments in familiar eugenic terms when he stated that 'among the agencies making for physical decay, mental retrogression and national enfeeblement, the use of alcohol by women stands prominent' (Kelynack 1902:196).

Women professionals were no exception in laying responsibility for racial degeneration on women. Mary Scharlieb, an eminent eugenicist doctor and writer, president of the Society f or the Study of Inebriety (1912-1916) and a consultant gynaecologist, also stressed the role of the individual drinking mother as nationally harmful. Mrs Scharlieb was not lacking in humanitarian sentiments about women's drinking, being well aware that environmental or social factors played an important part in women's health and feeling that much of women's alcoholism was due to 'misery drinking' because of the poverty and joylessness of their lives. Nevertheless, like most of her medical colleagues and the infant welfare movement of her time, Mrs Scharlieb believed that 'it depends on the mothers of the nation what the future men and women of that nation shall be' and she supported solutions aimed at changing individual behaviour, notably education, as the most promising way to address the problem (Scharlieb 1907).

The Women's Temperance Movement (although concentrating largely on the evils of male drinking) shared much the same view of women alcoholics as the medical profession. Writing in the late 1870s, Mary Bayly, a gospel temperance advocate, expressed the view that 'Women quickly pass beyond the range of moderate drinking. They have less power than men to resist temptation, and if the home life of our country is to be saved, temptation, to a great extent, must be removed out of the way' (Bayly 1878 cited in Kitze 1986:7). The British Women's Temperance Association (BWTA), while concerned about women alcoholics and involved in the provision of inebriate homes, clubs and activities for women, did not take on board an obviously 'feminist' approach nor espouse women's suffrage issues as did the American counterpart, The Women's Christian Temperance Union (Kitze 1986). Despite the many links and cross-memberships between the British Women's Temperance Association and other organisations more closely allied to contemporary feminist issues (e.g. the Independent Labour Party, which supported both female suffrage and temperance), the BWTA limited its campaigning to temperance issues and did not challenge prevailing conceptions of either the nature of womankind or of her place in society (Banks 1981)².

In short, the emergence of concern over women's drinking in Victorian England was a secondary, if powerful, element in the politics of imperialism and in the creation of a new ideology of motherhood, a trend which minimised the contribution of environmental or social factors and maximised the role of women's attitudes and behaviour in the creation of social problems. By the beginning of the 1920s, with changing social circumstances and a fall in the rate of alcohol consumption by men and women alike, the question of women's drinking ceased to have any political significance and faded from public consciousness.

The Rediscovery of Female Alcoholism – A Feminist Concern

By the late 1950s, when a new wave of concern over alcohol misuse arose, the focus was firmly on male drinking and in particular on the group of men whose drinking was clearly defined as 'alcoholic'. Women were much less visible in the treatment services and featured little in discussions of treatment approaches or in research studies³. It was not until the mid-1970s that the 'female alcoholic' was rediscovered in the UK – some years later than the revival of interest in the USA where research and discussion had been growing steadily for almost a decade (see the bibliography in Committee on Labor and Public Welfare 1976).

Many factors contributed to the renewal of interest in women's drinking and to the reformulation of the problem which was to take place over subsequent years, but there is no doubt that the women's movement was important. Earlier feminist and suffrage movements had not been centrally concerned with issues of women's health or experiences of health care. By contrast, the new feminism of the 1960s challenged existing orthodoxies on women's health status and the quality of health care they received. It provided a critique of medical practices and medical relationships with women, and placed women's health issues in a political and economic context. The new movement was also activist, campaigning for women's right to take control over their bodies and over the processes of medical care, and supporting the development of alternative approaches to health care and the formation of new forms of health care organisation (Boston Women's Health Book Collective 1973; Ruzek 1978; Doyal with Pennell 1979). It was the women's movement which provided the ideological motivation and the theoretical foundations for explanations of women's use and misuse of alcohol, and for the development of a critique of social responses to the female alcoholic.

By the mid-1970s changes had also taken place in the alcohol field which paved the way for defining as problematic the drinking habits of people whose alcohol use had previously gone unnoticed and who did not fit the stereotype of the typical 'alcoholic' – male, often vagrant and criminal, suffering from extreme alcoholism. The reluctance with which official sources in the 1950s had greeted the World Health Organisation's contention that alcoholism was a growing problem in western industrialised countries, including Britain, had given way by 1970 to the recognition of alcohol use as a major health issue which could affect large numbers of ordinary citizens (Baggott 1990).

Against the background of a new vigour of feminism and of an acceptance of alcoholism as a major health issue, a number of specific developments in the alcohol field were also important in bringing questions of women's alcohol use to the fore⁴. The first of these was the emergence of an 'interest constituency', drawn from among the new recruits to the growing field of alcohol research and service provision, a group of mainly female workers influenced indirectly, if not directly, by feminist ideology. The second factor was the development of a rationale which provided the theoretical and 'scientific' basis of analyses of women's drinking and which was necessary to gain recognition for, and legitimation of, the new concern. Finally, changes in the concept of the problem, from 'alcoholism' to 'problem drinking', linked to developments in research and service provision, were influential factors in the emergence of women's drinking as a concern meriting international attention.

The Emergence of An 'Interest Constituency'

The impetus for action came not from government initiatives or medical leaders but from people working at 'grass roots' in the services, many of them women, and many from backgrounds in psychology and social work rather than medicine. A key role was pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction - A Social-Anthropological View of Gender, Drink and Drugs
• 1. Women and Alcohol: The Emergence of a Risk Group
• 2. The Police, Gender and the Culture of Drug Use and Addiction
• 3. Symptoms, Struggles and Functions: What Does the Overdose Represent?
• 4. Drinking and Social Identity in the West of France
• 5. Whisky, Women and the Scottish Drink Problem. A View from the Highlands
• 6. Gender, Ethnicity and Alcohol in the Former Soviet Union
• 7. The Drinker as Chief or Rebel: Kava and Alcohol in Fiji
• 8. Drinking and Gender in Japan
• 9. Women and Wine in Ancient Rome
• 10. Gender, Community and Confrontation: Power Relations in Drunkenness in Ocongate (Southern Peru)
• 11. Drinking and the Management of Problem Drinking Among the Bari, Southern Sudan
• 12. Women, Moral Virtue and Tchat-chewing
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Subject Index