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.

This book examines North American women's engagement with their health systems and asks to what extent national citizenship has shaped women's health. Authors provide a much-needed analysis of the dynamic decades after 1945, when both Canada and the United States began using federal funds to expand health-care access and biomedical research and authority reached new heights. (Midwest).

In this fascinating history of alcohol in postwar American culture, Lori Rotskoff draws on short stories, advertisements, medical writings, and Hollywood films to investigate how gender norms and ideologies of marriage intersected with scientific and popular ideas about drinking and alcoholism. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, recreational drinking became increasingly accepted among white, suburban, middle-class men and women. But excessive or habitual drinking plagued many families. How did people view the "problem drinkers" in their midst? How did husbands and wives learn to cope within an "alcoholic marriage"? And how was drinking linked to broader social concerns during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War era? By the 1950s, Rotskoff explains, mental health experts, movie producers, and members of self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon helped bring about a shift in the public perception of alcoholism from "sin" to "sickness." Yet alcoholism was also viewed as a family problem that expressed gender-role failure for both women and men. On the silver screen (in movies such as The Lost Weekend and The Best Years of Our Lives) and on the printed page (in stories by such writers as John Cheever), in hospitals and at Twelve Step meetings, chronic drunkenness became one of the most pressing public health issues of the day. Shedding new light on the history of gender, marriage, and family life from the 1920s through the 1960s, this innovative book also opens new perspectives on the history of leisure and class affiliation, attitudes toward consumerism and addiction, and the development of a therapeutic culture.

Nursing History Review, an annual peer-reviewed publication of the American Association for the History of Nursing, is a showcase for the most significant current research on nursing history. Regular sections include scholarly articles, over a dozen book reviews of the best publications on nursing and health care history that have appeared in the past year, and a section abstracting new doctoral dissertations on nursing history. Historians, researchers, and individuals fascinated with the rich field of nursing will find this an important resource. Included in Volume 28... “Service is the Rent We Pay”: The Complexity of Nurses’ Claims to Their Place in Social Justice Movements The American Red Cross “Mercy Ship” in the First World War: A Pivotal Experiment in Nursing-Centered Clinical Humanitarianism The Nurses No-One Remembers: Looking for Spanish Nurses in Accounts of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) The Norwegian Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (NORMASH) in the Korean War (1951–1954): Military Hospital or Humanitarian “Sanctuary?” Matriarchs of the Operating Room: Nurses, Neurosurgery, and Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1920–1940

This book raises key questions about public policy, the politicization of medical diagnosis, and the persistent failure to address the treatment needs of pregnant alcoholic women. The author traces the history of FAS from a medical problem to moral judgment that stigmatizes certain mothers but falls to extend to them the services that might actually reduce the incidence of this diagnosis.