Lady Lushes

Michelle L. McClellan

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813576985
• eBook ISBN: 9780813576992
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

According to the popular press in the mid twentieth century, American women, in a misguided attempt to act like men in work and leisure, were drinking more. “Lady Lushes” were becoming a widespread social phenomenon. From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses, ” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order.
 
In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.
 

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Female Inebriate in the Temperance Paradigm
• Chapter 2. “Lit Ladies”: Women’s Drinking during the Progressive Era and Prohibition
• Chapter 3. “More to Overcome than the Men”: Women in Alcoholics Anonymous
• Chapter 4. Defining a Disease: Gender, Stigma, and the Modern Alcoholism Movement
• Chapter 5. “A Special Masculine Neurosis”: Psychiatrists Look at Alcoholism
• Chapter 6. “The Doctor Didn’t Want to Take an Alcoholic”: The Challenge of Medicalization at Midcentury
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Read More in the Series