Lady Lushes

According to the popular press in the mid twentieth century, American women, in a misguided attempt to act like men in work and leisure, were drinking more. “Lady Lushes” were becoming a widespread social phenomenon. From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses,” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order.

In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.

MICHELLE L. McCLELLAN is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she is also the director of the Public History Initiative, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

— Bulletin of the History of Medicine

— Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

— Bulletin of the History of Medicine

— David M. Fahey, author of Alcohol and Drugs in North America: A Historical Encyclopedia

— Nancy D. Campbell, author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy and Social Justice

— Social History of Medicine