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DEVIANT DRINKING OR DEVIANT WOMEN?

BY A. LYNN MARTIN
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

The attempt to use anthropological approaches to understand deviant drinking behavior encounters an immediate problem, that of the anthropological perspective itself. As explained by Mary Douglas, "the general tenor of the anthropological perspective is that celebration is normal and that in most cultures alcohol is a normal adjunct to celebration." In other words, far from studying drinking as a behavioral problem or as an aspect of deviant behavior, the anthropological approach is one of "problem deflation."[1] The consumption of alcohol in a society is not a problem unless and until someone defines it as such,[2] especially if those doing the defining are in a position of power, and the definitions are more a reflection of the fears and anxieties of those doing the defining than a reflection of the problems of those doing the drinking.[3]

These comments are appropriate for traditional Europe. Alcohol was the ubiquitous social lubricant at both the celebrations marking a person's passage through life and the festivals punctuating the calendar. It was also, in the form of ale, beer, or wine, a necessary component of most people's diet. Although some people counselled moderation in the use of alcoholic beverages, no one suggested abstention, and the consensus was that alcohol was necessary to maintain good health, while the consumption of water was dangerous. As a result women could consume large amounts of alcohol without anyone considering their behavior to be deviant.

How much did women drink? What do anthropological studies of differential drinking reveal? A cross-cultural study of 139 societies reveals that in none do women as a group drink more than men, that in many societies men drink more than women, and that women are likely to drink as much as men in societies where alcohol is not indigenous but introduced from outside.[4] Other studies of western society with its indigenous forms of alcohol reach similar conclusions, that is, women do not drink as much as men.[5]

Once again these comments are appropriate for traditional Europe. Indeed, scattered evidence suggests that in some areas of France peasant women did not drink at all or seldom.[6] Mack Holt, in his study of the wine makers of Burgundy, quotes the "Monologue du bon vigneron," who drank only wine: "water . . . is only worth putting in soup . . . . I leave that for my wife to drink."[7] Italian visitors to France often commented on the sobriety of upper-class women, who only used wine to color their water and took it as a great insult if someone told them that their breath smelled of wine.[8] The same Italian visitors implied that back home the women were even more sober than the French, and in his prologue to the Decameron, Boccaccio described the cellar of the villa as "stocked with precious wines, more suited to the palates of connoisseurs than to sedate and respectable ladies."[9]

Nonetheless, the bulk of the evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, indicates that women did consume alcoholic beverages, at times even approaching the amount consumed by men. The household books for the court of Henry VIII reveal that three ladies in waiting shared one gallon of ale each day for breakfast.[10] The typical maintenance agreement for widowed peasants in seventeenth-century Piedmont included 246 liters of wine per year;[11] that's enough for not quite a bottle of wine per day. The daily ration fixed by the magistrates of Toul for workers in the vineyards included 1.25 liters of wine for women,[12] and some of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's peasants of Languedoc, male and female, consumed one and a half to two liters of wine a day.[13] On the whole, my impression is that women regularly consumed what we would consider large amounts of alcohol while at the same time drinking less than men.

The evidence also reveals women with drinking problems, women whom we would consider alcoholics. The fourteenth-century Goodman of Paris included in his instructions to his young wife a description of a woman who had the classic symptoms of alcoholism: "God commands us to go to church and rise early and the glutton saith, 'I must sleep. I was drunk yesterday.' . . . When she has with some difficulty risen, know you what be her hours? Her matins are: 'Ha! what shall we drink? Is there nought left over from last night?' Then says she her lauds, thus: 'Ha! we drank good wine yestreen.' Afterwards she says her orisons, thus: 'My head aches; I shall not be at ease until I have had a drink.'"[14] English historians who use secular or ecclesiastical court records have found many cases of women prosecuted for habitual drunkenness. Somewhat typical is the case of Mary Hatton from Great Budworth; in 1669 a church court excommunicated her for day-long drinking binges and a holyday "misspent in drinking."[15] Finally, according to some accounts the increasing use of spirits late in the seventeenth century affected the drinking habits of upper-class women. Edward Ward described one such woman in his Adam and Eve stripped of her Furbelows: "As soon as she rises she must have a Salitary Dram to keep her stomach from the cholick, a whet before she eats to procure appetite, a plentiful dose for concoction, and to be sure a bottle of brandy under her bedside for fear of fainting in the night."[16]

The next question to ask the anthropologists is, "What were the effects of drinking?" Some might think that this is a question more appropriate for a physiologist than for an anthropologist, but anthropological studies of drunken comportment indicate that drunken behavior varies from one society to another. What is typical behavior for a drunk in one society is not at all typical in another; in some societies drunks are violent and aggressive, in others they are peaceful and passive, in some alcohol arouses sexual passions, in others it dampens them. In other words, drunken comportment is learned comportment; it is culturally mediated.[17] Anthropological studies reveal that one of the culturally mediated functions of alcohol in western societies is a sexual stimulant, so much so that excessive drinking among women is considered an indication of uncontrolled sexuality.[18]

The association between alcohol and sex has a long tradition in western society, going back to classical and biblical times, and has on occasion prompted attempts to prohibit women from drinking.[19] So strong was the association that any woman who ventured into a tavern or an alehouse ran the risk of losing her reputation.[20] Similar attitudes existed for women who worked at taverns; some medieval commentators on canon law argued that a husband who permitted his wife to work at a tavern could not charge her with adultery if she succumbed to temptation while at work.[21] As Chaucer's Wife of Bath noted in her prologue:

A woman in her cups has no defence,

As lechers know from long experience.[22]

Perhaps the best indication of the link between alcohol and sex is the connection of prostitution with the tavern and the alehouse. Alewives and barmaids worked as prostitutes, prostitutes sought customers at taverns and alehouses, and taverns and alehouses also functioned as brothels.[23]

The final question to ask the anthropologists is, "Why did people drink?" Here no consensus exists, and the anthropologists offer explanations ranging from social jollification, dependency conflict, reduction of anxiety, and quest for immortality to empowerment. Selden D. Bacon distinguishes between the functions of drink in simple societies, where alcohol has roles as a food, a medicine, and in religion, and its less important functions in complex societies. In complex societies drink has a role in social jollification by breaking down barriers between persons and groups and by promoting social integration and solidarity; alcohol does this by alleviating anxiety and tension, reducing inhibition, and promoting relaxation.[24]

In traditional Europe alcohol also had a role in social jollification among women. A common theme in English literature from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries was the group of women who gathered at the tavern or the alehouse to enjoy each other's company amid pots of ale or wine and shared food.[25]

Call forth your gossips by and by,

Elinor, Joan and Margery,

Margaret, Alice and Cecily;

For they will come both all and some.

 

And each of them will somewhat bring,

Goose, pigeon, or capon's wing,

Pasties of pigeons, or some other thing;

For a gallon of wine they will not wring.[26]

Some evidence indicates that this literary theme had its foundation in popular practice. When Thomas Platter visited England in 1599 he noted that women sought enjoyment at alehouses even more often than men.[27]

Two of the anthropological explanations for drinking have comparable conclusions concerning women. The first is the quest for immortality, as discussed by Isabelle Bianquis-Gasser in her article, "Wine and Men in Alsace, France." Bianquis-Gasser argues that the cycle of life and death associated with the vine and wine symbolizes regeneration and immortality. To become immortal men must drink wine to the point of unconsciousness so that they lose touch with "their mundane awareness." What about women? Women don't find their immortality in wine; they find it in bearing children.[28] To put it bluntly, the men get drunk, and the women produce babies!

Just as provocative is the article that discusses the second explanation, empowerment. In his article entitled "Drinking as a Manifestation of Power Concerns" Richard A. Boyatzis states that, "Men drink alcoholic beverages to attain, or regain a feeling of strength." Drinking makes men feel big, strong, and important, and it makes them feel that they can dominate or influence others. In short, alcohol leads to aggressive, assertive, and even violent behavior. What about women? According to Boyatzis, alcohol doesn't work that way for women. Drinking makes women feel more feminine, less assertive and aggressive, and less concerned with power.[29]

How does this work when applied to traditional Europe? Before answering this question I want to examine the deviant behavior known as disorderly or unruly women. The topic is the subject of Joy Wiltenburg's book, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany.[30] The disorderly woman was a recurrent theme in popular literature, a theme that challenged contemporary notions concerning the subordination and the submission of women to their husbands. Women were supposed to be obedient, modest, humble, silent, and sober; they should stay at home to safeguard their chastity and avoid even the suspicion of sexual dalliance. The disorderly woman upset these notions. As explained by Wiltenburg, "male authors often depicted women as disorderly creatures, whose licentious urge for dominance threatened to disrupt the carefully constructed social hierarchy. The cultural perception of women's power as disorder, and of their disorderliness as power, reflected male anxieties about the success of patriarchal rule. At the same time, the partial mirror of popular literature may provide a glimpse, though a distorted one, of some women's strategies for coping with that rule."[31]

Missing from Wiltenburg's analysis is the role of alcohol, the tavern, and the alehouse in the depiction of disorderly women. The few references in her book to drinking mainly relate to the husbands spending all of their time and money at the tavern or the alehouse, getting drunk, and beating their wives.[32] However, in other sources many of the comments about drinking by women had links with male anxieties concerning disorderly and unruly women, and many of the examples I've used in this paper, when examined further, reveal the links. Take the case of Mary Hatton from Great Budworth, excommunicated for day-long drinking binges and a holyday "misspent in drinking." The complete case against her reveals concerns about disorder; she was accused of "a lewd vicious and wicked life & Conversation," "idle vain talking, and other exercises not well becominge the Company or holyday."[33] To cite another example, at Dorchester in 1630 the authorities placed Mary Savage in stocks as a punishment for drunkenness, but they also charged her with being masterless, "having lived of long time idly and disordered and out of service."[34]

A similar concern with disorder is evident in the literature that depicted women enjoying each other's company at the tavern, for they went without their husband's knowledge or consent. To continue the poem quoted above:

A stripe or two God might send me,

If my husband might here see me.

She that is afeared, let her flee.

Quoth Alice then: I dread no man.

Not only did they challenge their husbands' authority by coming, according to John Skelton's poem, "The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng," they even bartered their husbands' personal effects to pay for their drink:

Some bryngeth her husbandes hood,

Because the ale is good;

Another brought her his cap

To offer to the ale tap.[35]

Another threat to patriarchal society resulted from the link between alcohol and sexuality. A good illustration of this is the divorce proceedings between Thomas and Elizabeth Case of Chester in 1625, as documented by John Addy in his book, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century.[36] Thomas sought separation at "bed and board," in effect a divorce, on the grounds of Elizabeth's drunkenness and her misdemeanors with young men. According to the many witnesses called to give evidence at the proceedings, Elizabeth did have a drinking problem. She often drank wine and ale with young men at taverns and alehouses. Less convincing was the testimony concerning her sexual misdemeanors with these young men; Thomas Cowper said that Thomas Jones said that John Crewe said that Thomas Myles' son had committed adultery with her. Nonetheless, the strong association between alcohol and sex combined with patriarchal notions that women should stay at home to safeguard their chastity and avoid even the suspicion of sexual dalliance no doubt influenced opinion. In addition, Elizabeth was a disorderly woman; she went to taverns and alehouses without her husband's knowledge or consent, and they fought and beat each other. Thomas won his divorce.

Returning to the question posed earlier, did alcohol empower women in traditional Europe or did it make them feel more feminine, less assertive and aggressive, and less concerned with power? All the historical evidence in this paper comes from male sources. The male construction of female drinking behavior linked this behavior to disorderly and unruly women and hence to empowerment. In other words, from the male perspective alcohol did indeed empower women, and men reacted by attempting to disempower them through the humiliating legal procedures of excummunication, stocks, and divorce. To return to a point made earlier, male concerns about female drinking were more a reflection of the fears and anxieties of males than a reflection of any problems of those women doing the drinking. And to modify a point made by Joy Wiltenburg, perhaps the empowerment provided by drinking permits us to glimpse one of women's strategies for coping with patriarchal rule.

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ENDNOTES

[1]Mary Douglas, "A Distinctive Anthropological Perspective," in Mary Douglas, ed., Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 4

[2]Mac Marshall, "Conclusions," in Mac Marshall, ed., Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages: A Cross-Cultural Survey (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1979), p. 452.

[3]Joseph R. Gusfield, "Benevolent Repression: Popular Culture, Social Structure, and the Control of Drinking," pp. 399-424 in Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, eds., Drinking Behavior and Belief in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

[4]Irvin L. Child, et al., "A Cross-Cultural Study of Drinking: III. Sex Differences," Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Supplement Number 3 (April 1965), pp. 49-61.

[5]Roland Sadoun, et al., Drinking in French Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, 1965), pp. 17-18, 35; see also Edith S. Lisansky, "Alcoholism in Women: Social and Psychological Concomitants, I. Social History Data," Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, XVIII (1957), p. 588.

[6]Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 114; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324 (London: Scholar Press, 1978), p. 249.

[7]Mack P. Holt, "Wine, Community and Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Burgundy," Past and Present, No. 138 (February 1993), p. 84 and note.

[8]Jean-Louis Flandrin, "Boissons et manières de boire en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle," in Max Milner and Martine Chatelain, eds., L'imaginaire du vin: Colloque pluridisciplinaire, 15-17 octobre 1981 (Marseille: Editions Jeanne Laffitte, 1983), p. 311.

[9]Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 64.

[10]Richard Valpy French, Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England: A History (London: National Temperance Publication Depot, 1884), pp. 134-135.

[11]Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 70.

[12]Guy Cabourdin, Terre et hommes en Lorraine (1550-1635): Toulois et Comté de Vaudémont (Nancy: L'université de Nancy II, 1977), p. 687.

[13]Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "Les masses profondes: La paysannerie," in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Michel Morineau, eds., Paysannerie et croissance (de 1450 à 1660) = Histoire économique et social de la France, Vol. I, part 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977), p. 783.

[14]Eileen Power, ed., The Goodman of Paris (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris (c. 1393) (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 84.

[15]John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 111; see also pp. 109, 189-195. For some other examples see David G. Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), p. 227; David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town (Dorchester) in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 74, 82.

[16]Quoted from A. D. Francis, The Wine Trade (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972), p. 156; see also André L. Simon, The History of the Wine Trade in England, (London: The Holland Press, 1964), III, p. 397.

[17]Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (London: Nelson, 1970), passim; see also the comments by Thomas Brennan, "Towards the Cultural History of Alcohol in France," Journal of Social History, XXIII (1989), p. 83.

[18]Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, "Introduction: Alcohol Commensality, Identity Transformations and Transcendence," in Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, ed., Alcohol, Gender and Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 16; Henk Driessen, "Drinking on Masculinity: Alcohol and Gender in Andalusia," in Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, ed., Alcohol, Gender and Culture, p. 74.

[19]E. M. Jellinek, "Drinkers and Alcoholics in Ancient Rome," Journal of Studies on Alcohol, XXXVII (1976), pp. 1729-1730.

[20]Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 131-132; G. R. Quaife, "The Consenting Spinster in a Peasant Society: Aspects of Pre-Marital Sex in 'Puritan' Somerset, 1645-1660," Journal of Social History, XI (1977), p. 230; Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 148-149; David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris, 1740-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 24.

[21]James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 387.

[22]Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 287.

[23]Clark, The English Alehouse, pp. 148-149; Peter Clark, "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas, eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 59; John L. McMullan, The Canting Crew: London's Criminal Underworld, 1550-1700 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 117, 124, 127; Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 257; Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200-1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 144.

[24]Selden D. Bacon, "Alcohol and Complex Society," in David J. Pittman and Charles R. Snyder, eds., Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1962), pp. 86-88; see also E. M. Jellinek, "The Symbolism of Drinking: A Culture-Historical Approach," Journal of Studies on Alcohol, XXXVIII (1977), p. 861.

[25]For some examples see Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 129; P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300-1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 321; Elizabeth Foyster, "A Laughing Matter? Marital Discord and Gender Control in Seventeenth-Century England," Rural History, IV (1993), p. 13.

[26]Quoted from A. E. Richardson, The Old Inns of England (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1948), p. 70.

[27]Leonard R. N. Ashley, ed., Elizabethan Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 8.

[28]Isabelle Bianquis-Gasser, "Wine and Men in Alsace, France," in Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, ed., Alcohol, Gender and Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 106.

[29]Richard E. Boyatzis, "Drinking as a Manifestation of Power Concerns," in Michael W. Everett, et al., eds., Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Study of Alcohol: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1976), pp. 265, 284,

[30](Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

[31]Ibid., pp. 7, 22-23. I changed the tense of the verbs.

[32]Ibid., pp. 82, 86, 94-95, 220-221.

[33]Addy, p. 111.

[34]Underdown, p. 82.

[35]John Skelton, "A Sixteenth-Century English Alewife and Her Customers--Skelton's Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng," E. M. Jellinek, ed., Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, VI (1945), p. 106.