“Their Lack of Masculine Security and Aggression Was Obvious”: Gender and the Medicalization of Inebriety in the United States, 1930–50
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the roles of gender and sexuality in the public and private debate over medicalizing inebriety in the United States from 1930-50. During this period various interest groups wrestled with two competing visions of how to frame chronic drinking, which came to be labelled alcoholism following the repeal of Prohibition. Mainstream doctors and psychiatrists agreed that the underlying cause of alcoholism was in the mind of the individual. A number of psychiatrists went further, suggesting a connection between alcoholism and latent homosexuality. In contrast, laypeople identifying themselves as alcoholics advanced a second, competing vision of alcoholism that framed it as a blameless physiological illness. This second understanding of alcoholism, particularly as promoted by members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), emphasized the need for restoring heteronormative gender roles for alcoholics (who were generally men) and their spouses (who were generally women) as an important step to recovery. Indeed, this may help to explain the success of AA and its medicalization model in the US from 1930-50, as both built upon widely held cultural assumptions concerning gender roles and sexuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".