Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America (review)

In Love on the Rocks, Lori Rotskoff has produced an excellent study of how alcoholism reflected the particular anxieties of the white middle class in the prosperous and conformist 1950s. In doing so, she sets this period in a longer consideration of shifting meanings of drink and its relationship to gender and family in American society from the late nineteenth century to about 1960.

For the post-World War II period, Rotskoff argues that alcoholism came to symbolize the failure of managerial work and suburban family life to meet white middle-class men's emotional needs. Women, cast primarily as wives who helped drive their alcoholic husbands to drink, were charged with the responsibility for helping them maintain sobriety.

Rotskoff sets the stage for her analysis of the mid-century with a thorough discussion of gendered drinking norms and temperance constructions in a preceding period from the Progressive Era through the repeal of Prohibition. For example, in the late nineteenth century, temperance reformers cast alcoholics' wives as victims of their working-class husbands' drinking, as they used alcoholism as an arena for symbolic expression of concern about women's plight in patriarchal families. In the 1940s, psychologists and sociologists created a catch-22 for the alcoholic's wife: She was expected to assume authority and take on breadwinning to keep the family together as the alcoholic husband abrogated his responsibility; yet this behavior also challenged her husband's masculinity and thus further complicated his alcoholism or prospects for recovery.

Although the Progressive Era provides a useful contrast with the mid-twentieth century, the heart of the book lies in Rotskoff's examination of the 1920s through the 1950s. Ironically, Prohibition influenced the norms that would culminate in the cocktail party of the 1950s. Prohibition encouraged drinking in the home, and the cocktail developed in part to flavor bad booze. Most provocatively, she finds important continuities between the motivations for the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the mid-1930s and cultural concerns about alcoholism in the 1950s, despite the profound social and economic differences between those two decades. As Rotskoff notes, sociologists and historians have told the story of the emergence of the "modern alcoholism paradigm" in the 1940s and the relationship of AA to this process. What she seeks to add is AA's ascendance to a position of cultural arbiter of the meanings of alcoholism and recovery in American society and its influence on the emergence of a therapeutic culture.

Some of the postwar story of a crisis in white, middle-class masculinity parallels other accounts of white-collar ennui and the rise of mom-ism. Moreover, although she provides detailed portraits of women 119 as they appear in sociologists' writings, films, and fiction, Rotskoff spends little time detailing the pressures on women to leave wartime jobs and assume restricted domestic roles; her discussion remains tightly focused on women as wives of alcoholics (as in her extensive discussion of Al-Anon) and, to a lesser extent, as drinkers of alcohol or as alcoholics themselves. Pressures that might have contributed to women's alcoholism are not as fully explored—either in the literature of the period or in Rotskoff's account.

Rotskoff draws on a variety of sociological and cultural analysis theories. She invokes Lewis Hyde's idea of gift exchange both to explain the socializing functions of drinking through such practices as treating and to show how AA also promoted homosocial bonding among its predominantly male membership. She draws on Arlie Hochschild's theories about the work of emotion management to explain the double bind that the emerging therapeutic perspective on alcoholism created for wives of alcoholics. Her sources include fiction, films, and advertisements, as well as published and archival materials related to AA and professional literature (psychological and sociological) on alcoholism.

For alcohol scholars, Love on the Rocks provides a fine-grained account of shifting norms regarding drinking...