From Drunken Woman to Female Inebriate? Drinking as Vice, Crime, Sin or Disease in Victorian and Edwardian London

This thesis examines women’s drinking and drunkenness in Victorian and Edwardian London between c. 1878 and 1914. It charts the ways in which drunkenness, or inebriety, was condemned and how it generated anxiety from reformers and commentators.

The thesis examines how inebriety was discussed in contemporary papers and commentary in order to explore the ways it was understood by Victorian and Edwardian society. It utilises newspapers, medical literature and political debates and discourses to shed light on why the female inebriate was perceived as a particular cause of concern, more so than her male counterpart. It also uses studies on working-class identities to examine how women’s drinking was seen as a key component of urban degeneration, and how concerns around women and the working classes heightened anxieties around the visibility of drunkenness as vice.

It applies lenses of gender and class analysis to examine how emphasising the need for control and the idea of degeneration made the female inebriate a complex figure, particularly in terms of mental illness, participation in public life, morality and sexuality. It argues that control of female inebriety was elicited through both physical and rhetorical methods, but that both demonstrated a willingness to move away from simple criminalisation.

This thesis charts the shift from viewing women’s drunkenness as a crime to seeing female inebriety as a disease, but argues that though this shift occurred, it was made complex and even undermined by discourses around femininity and social and cultural degeneration. Existing scholarship acknowledges that because there was no consensus on how to categorise inebriety itself, it was difficult to diagnose the inebriate. This thesis extends this categorisation by arguing that the figure of the female inebriate complicated the idea of whether drunkenness was a cause or a symptom of social degeneration, and therefore made “solving” inebriety a particularly difficult problem.