The Drunken Patriarch and His Family: A History of the Australian Feminist Response to Alcohol

Abstract

It is not my purpose in this chapter to estimate the incidence of alcohol abuse in Australia, to compute its social costs, or to seek remedies for its victims. Such information is already available in books such as Alcohol in Australia: Problems and Programmes, edited by A. P. Diehm, R. F. Seaborn and G. C. Wilson.¹ Instead I wish to describe how Australian women have responded at a political level to these problems. Waddy and Gilling in their article, ‘Alcohol and the Family’, note:²

Numerous studies have attempted a profile of the wife of the alcoholic and to trace her involvement in the aetiology and course of the abuse. Results indicate no single cluster of characteristics. Some show wives as hyperactive, with lack of personal conscience development, denial of dependency, anxiety and self-alienation. Husbands are characterised as depressed, inactive, physically and mentally tired. These studies perceive wives as having selected alcoholic husbands in order to satisfy their unconscious needs, and as having a vested interest in their husbands’ continued maladaption.

These studies are denying, in their suggestion of feminine masochism, more than a century of women’s actual historical experience.