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300 15 AlcoholintheModernWorld trends in regulation and consumption In the postwar world, alcohol consumption and policies have reflected broad social, cultural, and economic shifts as well as specific national and local conditions. They include the baby-boom generation and the decline of fertility rates, which transformed the age structures of almost all Western populations . Demographic movements, including the migration of millions of non-Europeans with distinctive drinking or nondrinking patterns, have had an impact on many European societies. And while official attitudes toward alcohol consumption have generally shifted in more liberal directions since the 1960s, there have also been countervailing tendencies related to specific issues such as drinking and driving and what is called binge-drinking. Finally, some societies faced significant alcohol-related challenges and responded with tighter controls. The governments of the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, continued the century-long saga of trying to reduce alcohol consumption among their people and lessen its social and economic effects. In the immediate postwar period, from 1945 to about 1960, alcohol remained or became a standard feature of daily life in most Western societies. Cocktails, which had been features of the prohibition era, continued to be more popular in the United States than anywhere else, and middle-class men (and fewer women) enjoyed the “cocktail hour” at the end of the workday. The most popular cocktails—martinis, manhattans, and old-fashioneds—became associated with business and suburban sociability. The distinction between the bar, lounge, or country club—the prime locations for middle-class public drinking—and the home was blurred. Advertisements increasingly implied that whiskey and other spirits were part of domestic hospitality.1 Although we must assume that many Americans drank at home as a matter of course alcohol in the modern world 301 throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we must also remember that, since the mid-1800s, the dominant discourses in the United States had portrayed drinking alcohol as behavior bordering on the pathological. Two of the unintended consequences of prohibition might have been to normalize public drinking and drinking by women, but consuming alcohol in the privacy of the home, shielded from public surveillance, presented different kinds of dangers. Reflecting the persistent belief that women were the repositories and guardians of public and family morality, churches and temperance groups placed the onus on women to ensure that drinking in their homes was moderate . As mothers, they were to steer their children away from temptations to experiment with alcohol; as wives, they were to understand how stressful jobs might lead their husbands to drink heavily; and as hostesses, they were to ensure that any alcohol served in their homes was consumed moderately. Clearly success in these challenges was not universal: surveys in the 1950s showed that high proportions of young people below the minimum drinking age consumed alcohol, many with their parents’ consent. A survey of college students in 1953 found that 79 to 92 percent of males and 40 to 89 percent of females drank alcohol with some frequency, which increased with family income. A study the next year in Nassau County, Long Island, found that 68 percent of fourteen-year-olds had parental permission to drink alcohol at home, and 29 percent were permitted to drink alcohol away from home on occasion.2 Although it is difficult to measure and describe, in the 1950s drinking seems to have been culturally accepted in the United States for the first time in a century and a half. There were, of course, constant warnings about heavy drinking and alcoholism, but one of the worst effects of these behaviors—domestic violence against women—was scarcely mentioned until the 1970s. The United States and France were often contrasted in their attitudes toward alcohol: on one hand, Americans were thought of as mistrustful of alcohol, willing to support prohibition (even if they eventually recanted), and cautious in their policies; on the other hand, the French were relaxed, full of joie de vivre, and heavy but happy drinkers who had integrated alcohol seamlessly into their work and private lives. After German occupation and the fascist Vichy regime, we might have expected the postwar French governments to liberate their citizens from the tight regulations imposed on alcohol production and consumption adopted during the war by Marshal Pétain. Instead, the transitional regime of General Charles de Gaulle confirmed the Vichy policies, limited the number of bars (which had fallen from more than [3...

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