I've enjoyed reading this thread despite the rather acrimonious start,
and have agreed with most of what the contributors have had to say
about drinking, both of alcoholic beverages, and of patent medicines
and pharmaceuticals. Can't help sticking my nose in again to address
two or three comments:
HEATHER GRIGGS: "My second point is that patent medicines are also
considerably more expensive than booze. Why drink a $1 bottle of Radway's
Ready Remedy when you could have a 5 cent shot of whiskey or bottle of beer
at your local (pub)? I understand that stereotypes may hold the seeds of
truth, but you must consider who's truth that is. To the Irish, from
inside their world, there is a completely different cultural approach.
Mind you I'm not addressing Catholic temperence groups...that's another
issue."
Why drink Radway's Ready Remedy at $1 a bottle when you could have a 5
cent shot of which at your local pub? Because you might just be a
woman in about 1900. That's more than half of the population. In my
dissertation, I compared 14 family household collections with 10
bachelor male household collections and found the families yielded
almost four times the relative frequency of liquor bottles than in the
bachelor male households. Furthermore, the families had almost three
times the relative frequency of patent medicines and pharmaceuticals.
Of course, if you were male, you COULD get a 5-cent shot of whiskey to
cure thirst or ameliorate the effects of a bad cold. But if you were a
"decent" woman, you drank whatever you drank at home, not in public.
I guess that was what I was getting at in an earlier posting when I
commented that the New Orleans study might have been seeing gender
instead of ethnicity. If their comparable collections came from a
household context of bachelor men (who took their spirits in public),
and the study collection was from a family context, then it might
APPEAR that the Irish drank more than the non-Irish comparative
collection.
So in reply to Lauren Cook's statement "...most urban dwellings
contain members of more than one gender, making it difficult to
contrast assemblages according to gender," I reply that it might be
difficult, but not impossible. I found at least 10 sites that had only
men on them. Comparing them to households of mixed gender can indeed
be instructive.
My point is that of course, there are many variables that can go into
this sort of equation: gender might be only one, ethnicity another,
economic class a third, etc. etc. Until we archaeologists start to
think hard about the questions we ask BEFORE we ask them, we might
well come up with some stereotypical answers, having nothing better to
fall back on.
And speaking of Catholic temperance groups, I also excavated a privy
filled with trash from a Catholic priest, dated to 1918. That was two
years after local prohibition had been enacted. At first, I thought
the very high relative frequency of liquor bottles in the pit
reinforced a certain stereotype of Catholics during prohibition. But
in a comparison with family collections of apparently "wet" and "dry"
persuasions, I found that the priest drank no more than the average
"wet" household. What he DID seem to have more of--in comparison to
the family households--was several times more non-alcoholic beverage
bottles, in particular, grape juice bottles. I believe the man was
actually being temperate. He came from an aristocratic Italian
background, and was no doubt used to having wine with his meals. When
prohibition hit, he finished off his supply, tossed it into the
abandoned privy pit (so the trash collector couldn't spread rumors),
and substituted grape juice at his table.
Of course, I can't prove that, but at least I didn't call the good
father a lush, either.
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