“The world seems a bit of a better place”: Alcohol and women at midlife

Midlife women in Western countries including Aotearoa/New Zealand have experienced increased economic and social freedoms alongside deregulated alcohol environments throughout their adult lives. They are also increasingly drinking at ‘at-risk’ levels. Public health messaging focussing on individual responsibility to manage alcohol consumption has had little effect in reducing consumption, and research shows that alcohol use remains embedded, pleasurable, and functional within these women’s lives. The present study aimed to examine how midlife women account for and make sense of their alcohol consumption in different places, contexts, and times, and to illuminate the factors that underpin these meanings. Following a review of existing research approaches on women and alcohol, I chose critical realism as an appropriate paradigmatic and methodological framework to create new, relevant, and practical knowledge in this area. Within this framing, I developed a critical realist theoretical framework for women’s drinking to allow repurposing of a wide range of interdisciplinary literature on women’s drinking and to guide the research process. To reduce alcohol-related harms, it is necessary to gain a greater understanding of the meanings that alcohol has in women’s lives, taking into account their feelings and sensations, the events and material circumstances of their lives, idealised expectations of living a good feminine life, and how these are shaped by broader neoliberal and patriarchal environments. To examine how midlife women account for their alcohol consumption in different places, contexts, and times, and the factors that play a role in their sense-making, I collected in-depth discursive data from 50 midlife women living in cities and towns in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This involved conducting 17 interviews and eight friendship groups (n=33) Information on their life circumstances and drinking behaviours was also collected. The women were predominantly white, heterosexual, married or de facto, mothers, highly educated, and with a relatively high disposable household income. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a critical realist discourse analysis methodology with two analytic approaches: Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis and affective-discursive analysis.

The findings demonstrated that the women utilised three main discourses in accounting for their alcohol use: ‘alcohol as enhancer’, ‘alcohol as enabler’, and ‘knowledge and awareness’. The women drew on these discourses — underpinned by postfeminist notions of being entitled to, and responsible for, creating positive experiences and alleviating negative experiences — to legitimise their drinking. However, use of these discourses was closely bounded by the layered and conflicting demands of idealised age and stage-related postfeminist sensibilities of living a good feminine life. These idealised femininities included mature feminine drinking sensibilities of restraint and moderation, traditional femininities of being nurturing, attractive and virtuous, and more contemporary femininities of being agential, pleasure-seeking, productive and competent, as well as responsible for their own health, well-being, and appearance.

In addition to constructing their drinking by drawing on the above discourses, a number of real factors shaped and co-produced the women’s meanings and experiences of drinking. These included feelings and sensations prior to, because of, and after drinking alcohol, such as pleasure, stress and remorse. These were interwoven with the pressures of postfeminist sensibilities which privilege certain ways of being and feeling for midlife women such as confidence, positivity, and resilience. Additionally, the women’s talk about drinking often referred to the difficulties that arose through material events and circumstances of their lives. Overall, they positioned drinking as a way to enhance life through fun and enjoyment, as a salve for life’s difficulties, and to show that they were discerning, health-conscious citizens. However, the primary discourses the women drew on functioned to obscure focus on the longer-term health risks of alcohol. Further, the women’s talk reflected neoliberal and postfeminist sensibilities that suggest it is their individual responsibility to ensure positive mental and physical health, and that deflect attention from how social and material conditions impact and shape their daily lives.

This work adds theoretical and empirical understanding as to how various factors combine to produce diverse meanings around alcohol, drinking behaviours, experiences, and potential harms, in women at midlife. The findings provide insight into the realities of women’s lives and the gendered social and material structures that underpin them. They support calls for multi-level policies to address the broad range of factors that shape alcohol use by women, and for gender equity to be an explicit aim of alcohol research and policy. As well as policies that reduce overall consumption and “de-normalise” drinking alcohol, policymakers could work with cohorts of women to develop interventions that disrupt the functional role of alcohol in their lives, including improving the overall social and economic position of women.