| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post–World War II America. By Lori Rotskoff. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv, 307 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2728-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5402-6.)

Love on the Rocks is a great title but a misleading one. Love, here, is most often emotion management, and the wonderful double meaning suggested by "on the rocks" never really materializes. Title aside, however, this is a thoughtful, persuasively argued, and historiographically rich cultural history, framed around another phrase with double intent: "the engendering of alcoholism" (p. 4). Lori Rotskoff explores the engendering, or formation, of institutions that helped to construct alcoholism as disease. More centrally, she analyzes the ways in which historically specific understandings of gender are used in a range of competing or mutually reinforcing discourses to construct American understandings of alcohol, drinking, and alcoholism. This effort not only adds a layer of complexity to the cultural history of drink in American society, it also serves—as Rotskoff argues—as a window on gender ideals and gender formation in midcentury America.

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