The issue of gender must also be considered in any historical overview of alcoholism.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,  alcoholic behavior,  or even drinking any alcohol,  was regarded as a male pastime.  As a result,  women who drank a little were viewed as aberrant and women who drank to excess were extremely aberrant.  Some saw a woman who consumed alcohol as evil and/or a temptress whose underlying goal was to lure men (especially married men or healthy,  unmarried men)  away from their families and into a life of dissolute drunkenness.

This was also the time frame when the “cult of domesticity,”  as it has been phrased by some authors,  became an important part of accepted family life.  The father was perceived as the sole breadwinner, while the mother was assumed to be the stay-at-home caregiver of children and manager of the home. A drunken husband and father threatened this ideal scenario,  but a drunken mother was considered unspeakably evil.  Some writers of the time said that such a person was so bad that she was not worthy of a tombstone when she died.

In the 1800s, women who became intoxicated in public could be punished severely.  Carolyn S.  Carter,  in her article on historical attitudes toward alcoholic women,  published in 1997 in Affilia, noted that “chronically drunk or alcoholic women could be committed to insane asylums, lose their children,  or be subject to involuntary hysterectomies.”

Some historians believe that the very underpinnings of the relatively new middle class in the United States at that time depended heavily on the idealized image of the woman as a gentle and kind homemaker.  Such an image clashed mightily with the view of a thuggish drunk woman who neglected or abused her own children.  One way that the ideal image could still be held and yet somehow reconciled with those women who drank,  says Scott Martin in Devil of the Domestic Sphere,  was for alcohol itself to be demonized.

Alcohol was then viewed as a substance so incredibly and inherently powerful and with such a malevolent impact that it could bring down saintly women who,  for whatever reason (sometimes through trickery),  had imbibed alcohol and then subsequently become addicted to it.

Martin described this view: “Women were different from men;  the monster alcohol exploited those very differences to compromise woman’s moral nature and transmogrify her into a horrible creature that resembled but outstripped the most degraded male drunkard.”

Women who were heavy drinkers or alcoholics were seen as sexually depraved creatures who usually became prostitutes.  Mark Edwards Lender,  in his chapter in Alcohol Interventions, wrote:  “Everything the country believed about women on one hand,  and about alcoholics on the other,  left it unprepared to envision women with drinking problems as real women.  Women were virtuous and pure, alcoholics were degraded; women defended the home;  alcoholics imperiled it; and while mothers strove to raise their children in a moral environment, drunkards were constant impediments to the task. Thus, to be an alcoholic was to behave in a way that was so far removed from public expectations of women in the nineteenth century that society could account for it only as a form of the most extreme deviance.”