Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940 (review)

Gender-related considerations, according to Catherine Gilbert Murdock, are critical to comprehending the war against alcohol in the United States from the Gilded Age to the New Deal era. Indeed, gender is the dominant consideration in this volume, especially in regard to the roles played by women in bringing about both National Prohibition and the domestication of drink in America. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the author states, alcohol consumption and related problems of abuse were thought of as exclusively masculine behaviors. The saloon came to represent the chief “bastion of maleness” (p. 14) and was perceived as a serious threat to “the values that respectable Americans, particularly respectable women, held dear” (p.16). Thus commenced the woman’s campaign to eliminate alcohol from American life. Particularly useful is the author’s discussion of the symbiotic relationship between the “pathologically intertwined” campaigns for women’s suffrage and National Prohibition, which involved all-out assaults on the powerful masculine political culture that allowed such havens of iniquity as saloons to exist in the first place. Only permanent “female intervention” in the political arena could assure complete victory over the purveyors of alcohol (p. 39).

Murdock does much more than simply dwell on these campaigns. She concerns herself with the realities of women’s drinking practices, including difficult to get at problems like alcohol and drug abuse. Drawing upon non-traditional source materials-cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and novels-she also shows that many women were occasional drinkers and served alcohol in moderate amounts to family and friends at home. “The decanter feminized alcohol enough to render it respectable,” even in the years immediately preceding Prohibition, argues Murdock, so much so that “alcohol’s integral relation to sociability and entertaining-spheres that American women traditionally controlled-would prove the temperance movement’s undoing” (pp. 67–69).

Much of the rest of Murdock’s study is an exploration of this theme-the domestication of drink-in relation to the campaigns of such groups as the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) to bring about repeal. Under its tireless leader Pauline Sabin, the WONPR did so by repudiating the “gendered collectivity” (p. 135) that had characterized the drive for National Prohibition. It derided the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as old-fashioned for continuing to typecast women as truly virtuous moral stewards of society; and it claimed the mantle of modernism by insisting that women, as well as men, could drink at home and in public without all sorts of evils besetting homes and communities. Groups like the WCTU thus went into serious decline, overwhelmed by new forms of heterosociality that permitted women and men to drink together moderately-and with newfound equality as well.

Even though full of suggestive ideas, this study is anything but an easy read. Subjects appear, disappear, and reappear almost at random, and the author too often attempts to carry her argument by repetition rather than by presenting hard evidence. Although careful at the outset to define such key terms as “prohibition,” “abstinence,” and “respectable,” the latter in relation to that amorphous group known as the “middle class,” Murdock does not clarify matters in regard to such critical terms as “traditional,” “modern,” and “domesticating.” Without defined meanings, readers cannot be sure what made a group like the WONPR more “modern” in relation to the “traditional” members of the WCTU or why women were more critical to the process of “domesticating” drink than, for example, millions of moderate male imbibers. By assuming “the omnipresence of gender in the debate over drink” (p. 3), Murdock all but dismisses other variables (class, ethnicity, age, religion, occupation) that numerous scholars have identified as essential to explaining the Prohibition phenomenon. One effect is to distort historical reality by eliminating any consequential role for male-dominated groups, such as the formidable Anti-Saloon League, in explaining the rise and fall of Prohibition in America.¹ Readers will discover...