International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

“‘Poison that Lurks in the Blood’: Physicians, Alcoholics, and Gender in the American Progressive Era”
Simone M. Caron

Abstract
Alcohol addiction divided the medical profession in the late nineteenth century; the medical discourse over alcoholism demonstrates its contested nature. Much of the medical literature and advertisements for “cures” considered men the problem drinker; women remain obscured. Relatively few physicians considered alcoholism in the late nineteenth century to be a condition affecting women. This article examines the development of a medical framework for understanding alcoholism and analyzes its application by doctors to women during the late nineteenth century, revealinghow the medical profession viewed male versus female inebriates, the eugenic impact of women’s drinking, and treatments to deal with alcoholism.The adoption of a medical framework was not a linear progression but a hybrid mix of medicalization, psychology, spirituality, self-help and control. Two interpretations of alcoholism prevailed: the “physicalistic view” defined it as a physiological disease in need of medical treatment, while the “moralistic view” identified it as a lack of selfcontrol that called for religious conversion, punishment, and often jail for indigentdrinkers. The article offers a microanalysis of the treatment of indigent and working-class alcoholic women at the Sophia Little Home (SLH) in Rhode Island where the SLH managers blended a medical agenda with a controlled environment, hard work, and willpower. The staff considered alcoholism as an addiction, not a moral failing. They believed alcoholics should notbe punished, forced to convert, or spend time in jail. The Home was neither a private inebriate asylum nor a public institution. It was a private association of white middle-class women devoted to working-class and indigent alcoholic women.They offered the SLH as an alternative environmentto change debauched habits, not isolate bad genes, and emphasized hard work as a means to remain sober and reclaim womanhood.

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