Book why women drink

Table of Contents Rave and Reviews. About The Book. About The Author. Photograph by Stephen Engelberg. Gabrielle Glaser. Product Details. Related Articles. Raves and Reviews. Resources and Downloads. Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! Glaser offers contemporary solutions to a very modern problem. While Alcoholics Anonymous is endorsed by many doctors, our judicial system, and is used in more than 90 percent of U.

AA is not the only solution for women drinkers in need. There are some alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous. In the early days of the republic, the only safe drink was alcohol — and American men, women and children drank five gallons of it each year. That includes Martha Washington: In a collection of recipes she left her granddaughter as a wedding gift, fifty were were for boozy drinks.

She thoughtfully included a couple of hangover cures. By the midth century, sand filtration systems made drinking water safe, and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant women set their sights on the prohibition of alcohol. Reformer Carry Nation took it a step further. She used a hatchet to destroy whiskey barrels. Prohibition changed everything about the way Americans drank. It also prompted coed drinking outside the home. Nobody could ever be sure if the feds would come, so people drank quickly, normalizing the idea of drinking to get drunk.

After Repeal in , American brewers and vintners advertised their product as refreshing and patriotic. Americans were used to sweet mixers that had disguised the taste of bathtub gin, so it took awhile. Rockwellian ads like these ran for more than a decade after World War II. A woman was always in the frame — as both a civilizing influence and a potential consumer. Likewise, the wine industry promoted its product as a wholesome beverage every woman, from young housewives to grannies at a luncheon, could enjoy.

Drinking had become a common female plot line. She combined an investigation of that organization with her own story of recovery.

Glaser and Johnston —- who are feature writers rather than investigative reporters — have taken on a far more amorphous project: trying to pin down the narrowing gender gap in alcoholism and investigating the many forces that are driving it. Glaser begins her chatty book by upending the customary A. Both rely heavily on scenes and observations from their private lives as mothers, wives and lovers. Both juxtapose this material with statistics as well as quotable snippets from interviews with experts, summaries of research studies, and mini-profiles of recovering alcoholics.

Both try to summarize large subjects in short chapters: the history of drinking in North America; the insidious role of advertising on women; A. Both cover a lot of territory in cursory ways. Glaser focuses on the United States and traces the genesis of her book to sequential observations she made as a mother of three children on the East and West coasts.

When she noticed a similar culture of drinking in Portland, Oregon, she began thinking about documenting it. Johnston, a public figure in Canada whose book enlarges on a part series of feature articles for the Toronto Star , is the more confessional writer. I have decided to work on this riddle of depression by writing about it. I have sold my editors a story on depression and suicide…. My own depression deepens….

My drinking increases. Passages like these perhaps seem more dramatic in Canada, where Johnston is a media figure. Her references to prominent Canadian people and places mean little to the American reader.

Instead, both books read like a series of feature articles that throw decontextualized numbers at the reader in order to bolster their impressions. In the same period the rate for young men rose only eight percent. More than 3. Alcohol is involved in nine out of ten rape cases.