High Vitality Cooking for Health or Love on the Rocks

High Vitality Cooking for Health (Kitchen Doctor Series)

Author: Maggie Pannell

The right food can make a big difference to health, and this fantastic Kitchen Doctor series provides the health conscious home cook with a multitude of delicious recipes and healthy eating advice in every volume.

Book about: Rutherford B Hayes or Chutes and Ladders

Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America

Author: Lori Rotskoff

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 writers such as John Cheever), in hospitals and at Twelve Step meetings, chronic drunkenness became one of the most pressing public health issues of the day.

John W. Crowley

Lori Rotskoff, who writes wonderfully well, has filled a blank in the (gendered social history of American drinking and sobriety from Prohibition through the fifties: a subtle, engaging, and now indispensable study.

What People Are Saying

John W. Crowley
Lori Rotskoff, who writes wonderfully well, has filled a blank in the (gendered) social history of American drinking and sobriety from Prohibition through the fifties: a subtle, engaging, and now indispensable study. (John W. Crowley, author of The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in Modernist American Fiction)

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
Ch. 1	Cultures of Drink in Prohibition and Post-Repeal America	17
	Dissolute Manhood and the Rituals of Intemperance	17
	Righteous Womanhood and the Politics of Temperance	27
	Depression, War, and the Rise of Social Drinking	34
	Drink, Gender, and Sociability in the 1930s and 1940s	52
Ch. 2	Engendering the Alcoholic	61
	From Intemperance to Alcoholism	61
	Diagnosing the Alcoholic Man	69
	Problem Drinkers and Returning Veterans in Postwar Popular Culture	86
Ch. 3	Alcoholics Anonymous and the Culture of Sobriety	105
	The Social Foundations of Mutual Help in the 1930s and 1940s	105
	The Early Membership of Alcoholics Anonymous	114
	Gendered Rituals of Fellowship	122
	Gendered Narratives of Illness and Recovery	139
Ch. 4	The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage	149
	Diagnosing the Alcoholic's Wife	149
	The Wives of AA and Al-Anon in the 1940s and 1950s	162
	Rehabilitating the Alcoholic Marriage	171
Ch. 5	Drink and Domesticity in Postwar America	194
	The Alcoholic Culture of the Postwar Subjects	194
	Alcohol and Family Trouble in Postwar Fiction and Popular Culture	211
	Drinking, Consumerism, and the Cultural Significance of Alcoholism	228
	Conclusion	235
	Notes	243
	Bibliography	283
	Index	301