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Conclusion ➻➹ Until the late eighteenth century in the Chesapeake, alcoholic beverages were considered a necessary part of daily life for health and socializing. Men valued women who could make alcoholic beverages and depended on this aspect of women’s cookery for survival and pleasure. By 1782, however, Luicinda Orr, an adolescent in Virginia, could record in her diary that she was “in a peck of troubles for fear” that the male guests staying at her plantation home “should return drunk.” When the gentlemen arrived and were, indeed, “tipsy,” she and her friend ran off to avoid them. Becoming tipsy had become something to disapprove of, and it was no longer women’s work to make the drinks.1 The eighteenth century saw other changes too, many sparked by developments in technology. The invention of the notion of “science” and technological innovations such as hops, the alembic still, improved cider presses, and the Hewes crab apple led men in Europe and America to claim that alcoholic beverage production was chemistry, not cookery, and belonged to men’s domain. Although the Chesapeake lagged one hundred years behind the rest of the Atlantic world in this transition, it did slowly catch up, particularly when the Continental Army of the American Revolution helped spread the new thinking. Women did not resist this change; given that they had plenty to do and that they had not earned money from making alcohol because of the Chesapeake’s rural character, there was no reason for them to contest men’s assumption of women’s work. Women did continue to manage most of the taverns in the region, despite the fact that the tavern licenses were in male names. Tavernkeeping was something that women could do as they managed their households. Men adapted alcoholic beverage technology to different ends. Large planters used technology to make ever larger amounts of alcoholic beverages for sale, although many found profits elusive, particularly after small planters stopped buying from them in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Small planters had once depended on large planters for drinks when women’s household production was not sufficient. In the mid-eighteenth century, though, small-planter households used technology to create a drink trade with people of their own class, severing their dependence on large planters and their small connection with the Atlantic world in order to exchange and sell alcohol with people of their own kind. Finally, drinking alcohol at all became a choice. Until the late eighteenth century there was, simply put, nothing nonalcoholic to drink in the Chesapeake. The spread of tea and coffee into the region, and their increasing affordability, meant that as the century wore on, drinking alcohol began to appear to be a personal choice. Upper-sort colonists ignored the fact that coffee and tea cost more than alcohol and chose to see alcoholic beverage consumption as a personal preference or bad decision. Slave owners in particular began to punish slaves and servants for drinking alcohol. The region would not join the temperance movement until the 1830s, but late-eighteenth-century colonists created the preconditions that allowed the temperance movement to flourish later. Given that for centuries women had made alcohol, it is perhaps ironic that women led both the temperance and prohibition movements in America in the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the temperance movement, especially in New England where the economic and social changes wrought by industrialization were greatest, white middle-class women pressed men to “take the pledge” and forsake alcohol. Women thought that they were helping to make the American republic successful by encouraging men to restrict their drinking. More or less a century later, women amplified their alcohol-limiting activities and combined the fight for women’s suffrage and for more limited drinking with the prohibition movement, inherently arguing that women’s voting and women’s vigilance against alcohol would keep the republic pure. The suffragists and prohibitionists were successful. Women gained the right to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Following many state laws and constitutional amendments, Congress approved the prohibition of the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors in the United States and its territories in January of 1919. While drinking itself was not illegal, for a time making, selling, or transporting alcohol was (Congress repealed prohibition in 1933). While it is possible to speculate that women fought to control alcohol consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because they...

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