Expulsion, Incarceration, Incapacitation. Policing Drinking Women in Poland and Britain in the Second Half of the 19th Century

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ABSTRACT In Victorian Britain and post-partition Poland, despite cultural, political and economic differences, there was a shared belief that women’s drinking was more harmful than men’s which prompted formal and informal methods of policing. In this article we show how control mechanisms emerged in different environments, what their motivations and effects were, and by which actors they were deployed. By cross-referencing public discourse with reformatories and courts records, we have distinguished models of policing women drinkers and show how disciplinary tools were used differently by both policers and the policed.