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.
 

MICHELLE L. McCLELLAN is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she is also the director of the Public History Initiative, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
 

​"​Lady Lushes is an impressive and major contribution to women's studies and the history of medicine in the United States."

"Lady Lushes is a welcome contribution to the social history of medicine and health, as well as to the growing field of drinking studies....This is a ground-breaking study that draws on a range of sources, including historical periodicals, medical journals, letters, self-help guides and institutional records."

"From 'fallen angels' to 'lit ladies,' the drinking women who haunt these pages embody the ambivalence of alcohol. McClellan traces the fluctuations in American expectations, taking pharmacology seriously but situating it squarely within gendered social constraints."
 

"[McClellan's] book provides a model analysis for students of the history of identity politics; as such, it could also find a place on intermediate or advanced social history courses. Feminism transformed the ‘therapeutic industrial complex’ after the 1970s, diversifying understandings of addictive experience and including behavioral as well as substance addictions, yet women’s health continues to be under-researched and often under-treated; therefore, intermediate courses on American medicine and society would benefit from inclusion of this work."

"Lady Lushes provides an important supplement to the established historical insight that affluent white women tend to elicit sympathy while other groups of substance users are vilified. As McClellan deftly demonstrates, although the inebriety paradigm for female alcoholism evoked more sympathetic attitudes than the medical paradigm, neither produced a cure that benefited women."

"Lady Lushes provides an important supplement to the established historical insight that affluent white women tend to elicit sympathy while other groups of substance users are vilified. As McClellan deftly demonstrates, although the inebriety paradigm for female alcoholism evoked more sympathetic attitudes than the medical paradigm, neither produced a cure that benefited women."