Book Review

Canada and the United States

Catherine Gilbert Murdock explores the heretofore neglected and nearly invisible world of the respectable female drinker. Using such sources as etiquette manuals, cookbooks, and popular fiction, she reveals how alcohol constituted an integral part of these leisured ladies' lives. She also demonstrates that these drinking women had an enormous impact on the American temperance movement, the fate of Prohibition, and the development of middle-class cocktail culture.

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Murdock points out that both "wet" and "dry" middle-class women deplored the pre-Prohibition saloon for its alcoholic excesses and its corrupt political influence. Very different, however, were their attitudes toward the domestic and "domesticated" use of alcohol at homosocial afternoon gatherings and heterosocial dinner parties. Wets saw nothing evil in utilizing drink as a social lubricant in the home setting, as long as guests maintained middle-class standards of polite comportment. They also saw nothing objectionable in patent medicines like Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (itself twenty percent alcohol). It was non-domestic drinking that worried these female wets. The women disapproved of immigrant workers in their saloons, middle-class husbands in their private clubs, and, by the 1910s, their own rebellious daughters in the new cabarets, nightclubs, and dance halls.

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