The state's "sharp line between the sexes": women, alcohol and the law in the United States, 1850‐1980

Abstract

Beginning in the 1850s, American case and statute law established alcohol policies that applied specifically to women, which aimed broadly to promote temperance among both sexes. These measures reflected the powerful hold of a middle-class Victorian ideology that stigmatized female drinking, associated women with temperance, and kept women legally dependent in general. American laws on women and alcohol fell into two broad categories. The first was access laws, which restricted women's ability to purchase alcohol, patronize liquor outlets and work in the alcohol trade. These measures aimed to protect women from becoming drunkards, and depleted their legal power. The second group was domestic laws, including marriage, divorce and civil liability statutes. They aimed to protect women from drunken family members, especially husbands, and actually bestowed legal authority on women. Although both sets of laws promoted temperance, they did so both by expanding and contracting women's legal influence. These measures survived until the 1970s, when a series of court decisions overturned them on the basis of sex discrimination. The evolution of these laws shows how middle-class attitudes about female drinking were codified into sex-specific alcohol policy for most of the nation's history.

Biological basis of sex differences in drug abuse: preclinical and clinical studies

“…For example, women experience more social disapproval for drug use (Beckman and Amaro 1986;Gomberg 1993;Reed and Mowbray 1999); thus, drug use is more stigmatized for women than it is for men. However, societal views about drug use in women are changing, and drug use in women is becoming more acceptable and less stigmatized (Nicolaides 1996). The question is, how will these changing views on drug use in women affect the number of women and the proportion of women to men who use and abuse drugs?…”

The Narrowing Gender Gap in Arrests: Assessing Competing Explanations Using Self‐report, Traffic Fatality, and Official Data on Drunk Driving, 1980–2004*

“…Historically, alcohol policies specific to women promoted female temperance, mainly by curbing female access to alcohol (e.g., exclusion of women from frequenting or working in drinking places and differing age restrictions for women and men). Even after Prohibition, sex-specific alcohol laws remained on the books in many states, which signaled statutory perceptions of women as in need of protection and notions of alcohol as interfering with femininity goals (e.g., sexual purity, demureness, and domesticity) (Nicolaides, 1996). Not until the 1970s did laws begin to shift away from sex as a criterion to restrict alcohol access.…”

“…Undoubtedly, these gender-specific changes in social control impacted subsequent police DUI arrest decisions so that 3. A full legal history of gender and alcohol policy is beyond the scope of this article (see Nicolaides, 1996), but it is worth describing the three key alcohol-related cases identified by legal scholars as crucial in changing the climate that governs women's drinking and its treatment by the law and its agents. These alcohol cases were the foundation for broader legal movements to abolish sex discrimination and to establish equal protection norms.…”

The “new masculinity”: Addiction treatment as a reconstruction of gender in Puerto Rican evangelist street ministries

“…In one of the few cultural studies of masculinity and addiction, Davis (1994) observes that for a Latin American man the label of addict derives from his inability to fulfill his role as family provider and his low stature in his community; while heavy drinking is socially sanctioned, alcoholism (defined as substance use that interferes with upholding social responsibilities) is associated with shame and moral weakness. The literature on women and addiction is more extensive, pointing to addiction as a way to cope with gender inequality (Forth-Finegan 1991), to gender-specific state regulation of alcohol and drug consumption reflecting views of substance use as (socially) pathological among women, compromising performance of femininity in their homes and communities (Campbell 2000, Nicolaides 1996), to women’s emphasis on relatedness and economic dependence on men as impeding their treatment (Amaro and Hardy-Fanta 1995), and to gendered treatment outcomes, such as in Therapeutic Communities (McCorkel, Harrison and Inciardi 1998). These bodies of work on women call for reciprocal attention to masculinity in addiction.…”