Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (review)

A Scottish folk song tells the travails of a "Wee Cooper o' Fife" who had "taken a gentle wife. . . . She wouldna bake, she wouldna brew for spoiling o' her comely hue." "Wouldna brew"? Was that ever a housewife's job?

This book takes us back to a time and place—"the Chesapeake" before the American Revolution-where it was indeed the job of a housewife, even a gentlewoman. The author describes the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland counties on Chesapeake Bay and tributary rivers) as an anomalous place where the removal of brewing from the kitchen lagged behind New England as well as England. Both baking and brewing are shown among the tasks of six busy seventeenth-century Englishwomen on the dust jacket (and p. 118), but "Beer and urban alcohol production had become men's domain in England by the end of the seventeenth century" (p. 31). That gender shift took an extra century in the colonial Chesapeake.

Sarah Meacham asks what caused the lag, and answers: the technologies for brewing outside the home were not yet available, although they had been in England for centuries. Why were those technologies so laggardly in arrival and adoption? In answering, she describes a socioeconomic interweaving of agriculture, class distinctions, knowledge, communication, and transportation. The population was rural, scattered, and dependent on a monoculture of tobacco to be shipped abroad. People were divided into upper, middling, and lower "sorts." The upper sorts ("big planters") had more acreage, money, laborers (including slaves), books, education, and opportunities to travel and communicate by writing with the upper sorts in England and Europe. The middling ("small planters") and lower sorts had commensurately fewer of these goods and advantages. Growing tobacco was arduous, demanding time, attention, and energy by everybody, leaving little for other enterprises. Where towns were absent, there were no markets and few craftsmen. Material goods had to be imported. Ships were unreliable; transportation by land was rough. Information, equipment, and techniques moved slowly.

However, people did need to drink. Alcoholic beverages were what they drank, and colonial Chesapeake women made them in their kitchens. They made cider from apples, perry from pears, rum from molasses, and various "beers" from spruce, ginger, or persimmons, but—lacking barley or hops—almost never from grain. They boiled and condensed cider and other fermented fruit and berry juices into higher-proof brandies. The women on the big plantations made more of these drinks than the big plantations consumed. The excess was bought by small plantations. Colonists drank "startling amounts of alcohol. By 1770 the average adult white man drank the equivalent of seven shots of rum per day; and an average white woman drank almost two pints of hard cider per day" (pp. 1-2).

People drank alcoholic beverages in colonial Chesapeake homes, work-places, churches, courtrooms, legislatures, commons, and of course at taverns, typically run by women, even when the licenses were assigned to men. The chapter on "White Middling Women and the Tavernkeeping Trade" explores the policies of licensing in relation to family status, hypothesizing that the preference given to middling women as managers was intended to moderate customers' behavior.

Chesapeake's lag in "masculinization of alcohol production" (chapter 6) eventually dwindled during and after the American Revolution. With population increase and rising demand, denser habitation and wider markets made larger production units outside the home economically viable, so larger and "improved" stills and presses for mash were imported, and worked by men. Their women gracefully and probably gratefully conceded to them the job of brewing commercially and even at home.

Meacham has studied and interrelated a broad variety of primary sources for this book: diaries, letters, account books, probate inventories and wills, cookbooks, court and local government records. The result is an eminently insightful, readable, and usefully annotated history.