Medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood.

Introduction    
1     The Female Inebriate in the Temperance Paradigm    
2    “Lit Ladies”: Women’s Drinking during the Progressive Era and Prohibition    
3    “More to Overcome Than the Men”: Women in Alcoholics Anonymous    
4     Defining a Disease: Gender, Stigma, and the Modern Alcoholism Movement    
5     “A Special Masculine Neurosis”: Psychiatrists Look at Alcoholism    
6    “The Doctor Didn’t Want to Take an Alcoholic”: The Challenge of Medicalization at Mid-Century    
Epilogue

Acknowledgments    
Notes
Bibliography    
Index

 

MICHELLE L. McCLELLAN is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she is also the director of the Public History Initiative, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.