Women and drink in Edwardian England.

Abstract

In Victorian England excessive drinking was seen as almost exclusively a male prob- lem, but around 1900 the issue of female intemperance began to be widely discussed. In the first years of the twentieth century concern about women's drinking habits was voiced by an otherwise disparate group which included temperance workers, eugeni- cists, social reformers, imperialists and members of the medical profession. It is by no means certain that women were in fact using and abusing alcohol to a significantly greater extent than before: the evidence was and remains inconclusive. The Edwardian outcry against female intemperance derived its intensity less from the known dimen- sions of the problem than from the broader concerns of the time. Foremost among these were doubts about Britain's economic and imperial future, fears that her urban-based population was in the process of physical decline, and uncertainties in the face of challenges to traditional nineteenth-century assumptions about the place of women in society.