Table of Contents:
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Cultures of drink in Prohibition and post-repeal America
  • Dissolute manhood and the rituals of intemperance ; Righteous womanhood and the politics of temperance ; Depression, war, and the rise of social drinking ; Drink, gender, and sociability in the 1930s and 1940s
  • Engendering the alcoholic
  • From intemperance to alcoholism ; Diagnosing the alcoholic man ; Problem drinkers and returning veterans in postwar popular culture
  • Alcoholics Anonymous and the culture of sobriety
  • Social foundations of mutual help in the 1930s and 1940s ; Early membership of Alcoholics Anonymous ; Gendered rituals of fellowship ; Gendered narratives of illness and recovery
  • Dilemma of the alcoholic marriage
  • Diagnosing the alcoholic's wife ; Wives of AA and Al-Anon in the 1940s and 1950s ; Rehabilitating the alcoholic marriage
  • Drink and domesticity in postwar America
  • Alcoholic culture of the postwar suburbs ; Alcohol and family trouble in postwar fiction and popular culture ; Drinking, consumerism, and the cultural significance of alcoholism.