Women and Beer: Is it just a ‘Man’s drink’?
Henry Singleton The Ale-House Door c. 1790
By Carys Lloyd, Second Year History
‘A pint?!’ my grandmother gasped. ‘Women drink wine, not lager – that’s not very ladylike!’. I was meeting my grandparents for a couple of drinks in Bristol last year, and my nan was flabbergasted at the notion of a young woman like me ordering a pint. In fact, this somewhat misogynistic narrative underpins a lot of modern-day drinking culture; the idea that no woman really likes a pint, and should stick to the wine, spirits, or at most, cider. If you do, you run the risk of being branded a ‘pick-me girl’, done so only in order to seem like ‘one of the boys’. However, women used to be integral to the production and consumption of brewing and drinking. So, what’s changed, and why?
Nowadays, beer is integral to ‘lad’ culture, particularly at university. It is reiterated within popular culture that beer is, in essence, off-limits for women. Middle-aged mothers decorate their kitchens with painful signs with slogans along the lines of ‘Gym? I thought you said gin!’ and ‘It’s wine o’clock!’. Noticeably, any nod to beer is nowhere to be seen. The shift to women drinking beer again as a phenomenon is thus fairly new, as demonstrated by my grandmother’s incredulousness! This is ultimately due to a transformation of both the function of beer and the spaces in which consumption occurred, having transformed from an integral part of sustenance to an element of leisure, to the target of 20th-century diet culture and the anchor of university life. Each shift meant that access to beer and the position of women generally were altered, from being essential characters in the brewing and production of beer, to being almost entirely excluded for periods of time. Today, the discourse around drinking culture and the mounting pressure upon women transgress all spaces, granting beer consumption a somewhat unfastened affair, acceptable to partake in anywhere, anytime.
Beer culture now has stayed far from its origins. There have been records of beer being produced as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, being brewed most typically by women. The caloric denseness of beer meant that it was key to maintaining sustenance within the population and was a substantial part of their diet. For women, brewing beer was a means to generate some agency within a hardened patriarchal society; through its production, they could earn some money and become more self-sufficient. In addition, Mesopotamia’s polytheistic society recognised the deity of brewing as a goddess – Ninkasi. The Hymn to Ninkasi acts as a both a recipe and a ritual and translates into the techniques used by the brewers as far back as 1800 BCE. The Hymn depicts Ninkasi producing the beer, placing her in an active role in not just brewing, but sharing the secret of the brewery; in other words, the power lies with the goddess. In addition, this somewhat manifests itself within Sumerian society. The Code of Hammurabi was a set of around 300 laws that governed ancient Mesopotamia, and only referred to ‘she’ when describing tavern owners, suggesting that women were granted most, if not all, of the jurisdiction of brewing and beer. So, whilst beer was integral throughout society, its production was a womanly one.
Similarly, the Middle Ages saw women at the forefront of the pioneering and development of beer recipes. In the 12th century, visionary, prophet and (amongst other things) medical practitioner Hildegard von Bingen recognised the preservative qualities of hops when added to beer. This was preserved in part II of her book Liber Subtilitatum Diversarum Naturan Creaturarum, in which she unpicked the diversity of the natural world. It was within this period, also, that the alewife emerged. The alewife was a figure that withstood the increasing masculine domination of beer consumption in the Early Modern period, a symptom of the wider double-standard and female-coded restrictions of the period that laid the model of the obedient maternal woman. Whilst historians have typically painted the Early Modern alehouse or tavern as a male space, the existence of the alewife demonstrates that the reality is a lot more complex. The importance of the alewife in attracting business is seen through an account of an alehouse in Myddle, Shropshire, a thriving business which pins its popularity to ‘his wife’s sake, whom the people there called white legs because she commonly went without stockings’, despite the landlord being ‘deformed in body’ with a ‘grim swarthy complexion’.[1] The shift in the woman’s role, and the changing discourses around femininity, is clear to see here: from pioneers of production to a physical attraction. The alewife, as a form of male spectacle, thus captures the beginning of the tavern or pub as an entirely masculine place.
From this period until the late 20th century, the presence of women in beer-drinking spaces seemed to be in decline. In ‘Pub and the People’, it is highlighted how this culture actively worked to exclude women, and thus can be used as a microcosm to understand wider dynamics between masculinity and femininity during this period, particularly illuminating fears[2]. The Industrial Revolution and the establishment of a ‘new, rugged masculinity’ (Roper) worked alongside the emergence of the concept of leisure, which was moulded as a masculine pastime. Gender roles became set in stone – women were expected to remain within the ‘private sphere’ of the home, whilst the ‘public sphere’ of work was an entirely masculine one. This also meant a shift in the meaning of beer drinking – no longer a form of sustenance, it became a means for the working man to unwind before returning to his home, which had been tended to and maintained by his wife. The pub(lic) house was not a place for the now deemed innately maternal women. However, the development of the 20th century saw the erosion of starch Victorian roles, as female agency began to be unlocked through resistance from women themselves alongside a tumultuous global context of wartime and disconnect. As a result, women began to traverse the increasingly blurred boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’, as workspaces and education institutions began to become less male-dominated. Surely, the pub would be next!
‘It takes a bold girl to ask for a Guinness’, Guinness advertisement (1970s)
However, whilst progressive in many ways, post-war Britain still had a pub culture rooted in masculine working-class tradition. Despite drinking now being far removed from its’ home-based origins, there still was an element of the locality to the pub, as working-class communities particularly used the space as a form of social togetherness. The media and marketing of the explosion of lager in the 1960s altered this into a more commercialised, large-scale business, and marked a turning point in the relationship between women and beer. The ales and stouts that for centuries had provided women with a means of agency now declined in sales. On the other hand, many of the marketing campaigns looked to actively draw women into beer consumption by utilising the ‘blokish’ culture to shape the image of the ‘new woman’. As seen in the Guinness advert above- whilst not lager, the commercial success of these brands saw the shift from local, home-brewed beers (historically done by women) to large-scale production – the tension between femininity and beer-drinking is played upon to boost sales. However, the aim of the campaigns was just to only do that - boost sales! Even with women now well-established in drinking spheres, this idea that beer was synonymous with the man persevered. The plight of women and diet culture in the 80s and 90s exacerbated this, and still can be seen today. The femininity of spirits and wine remained, evident still today through Gen X décor slogans around open-plan kitchens in tidy suburbs, attaching buzzwords of ‘low-calorie’ and ‘cheat day’ to the forefront of drinking discourse. The ‘Cocaine Chic’ years of the 90s favoured vodka and cigarettes in tandem with newly emerging rave spaces, not the comforting, slower-paced sipping of a pint in a pub. Essentially, the spaces in which alcohol was made available changed the meaning of beer and the way in which it was consumed – for women as much as men. In the 20th century, the home often existed in tension with the pub and the pint – however, historically, these were, at their foundation, incredibly intertwined with the lives and legacy of women.
Only a matter of days ago, Vice UK released their findings on a study that women are binge-drinking more than men for the first time. Whilst focusing on only American university students, Western drinking culture translates fairly accurately (with, if anything, more of a binge-drinking reputation in the UK). Drinking spaces have often been somewhat of a microcosm to the gender relations during that period, as a space to navigate and assert notions of masculinity. So, the next time you pop around the corner to your local pub with some friends or indulge in a bottle of Peroni (or Carling, for the students) after a busy day – take a minute to reflect on the complex and intricate yet incredibly integral, role of women in the popularity and production of beer as we know today.
[1] Gough, The History of Myddle
[2] The Pub and the People (1943)