6 Elsewhere, such as in the UK, wartime regulation, for example of drinking hours, was continued into the interwar years. 5 The First World War was a catalyst for increased curbs on drinking in several of the belligerent countries prohibition was introduced during or shortly following the Great War in eleven countries, including Russia, the USA, Norway, Finland, Canada and Hungary. In addition, seismic international events that provoked significant ‘social turmoil’, most notably war, tended to heighten socio-moral concern around alcohol consumption in general and female drinking in particular, mirroring broader anxieties around perceived changes to gender roles wrought by war-time mobilisation. This general trajectory in parts of western Europe and in the Americas did not unfold, of course, in a uniform, consistent way but rather was shaped by and reflected local particularities and practices, viticulture and commercial interests, national legislative frameworks and other restrictions, as well as transnational influences and transfers of habits, mores and fashions around drinking. 4 It is clear also that the increased and increasingly acceptable presence of women in mid-to-late twentieth-century drinking spaces affected not only the consumer practices and gendered identities of women, but also of men. Historians of female consumers of alcohol, working especially on experiences in industrialised Anglophone countries, have demonstrated both the increasing presence of female consumers in public drinking spaces (indeed, they were never wholly absent) and growing societal acceptance of this, particularly in the twentieth century, alongside continued contemporary forms of problematising female drinking, manifested in anxieties around ‘excess’ consumption and intoxication, maternal drinking, personal and public health and morality. Female drinking, meanwhile, has tended to be problematised, ‘equating idealized femininity with temperance and sobriety’, while construing ‘female alcohol consumption unfeminine and unrespectable, with drunkenness in particular associated with physical degeneration and moral bankruptcy’. Most often, albeit with important exceptions and transgressions, gendered socio-cultural codes around women's drinking operating across diverse geographical and temporal settings tend to posit male drinking, especially in public venues, as normative. 2 Gender comprises one component of ‘the interlinked matrix of factors’, alongside age, class, occupation, sexuality, race/ethnicity, among others, that mould drinking practices and cultures, and vice versa. 1 While alcohol consumption clearly constitutes a bodily act involving various ‘biochemical, physiological, and pharmacokinetic’ responses in individual drinkers, it is also one that is enacted within particular – historically contingent and thus dynamic – social, cultural and political frames. Scholars across multiple disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, criminology and public health, have long acknowledged that ‘gender plays a major role in shaping the ways the world drinks’. Ultimately, it argues that despite attempts to construct women's drinking in archly nationalistic terms, the discourses and actual practices of Italian women around alcohol consumption operated within profoundly transnational frames. It then moves to examine sources left by interwar Italian women to explore what, how and when they drank. The article explains how Italian women were imagined and addressed by regime propagandists, alcohol industry producers and temperance campaigners as (a) simultaneously the principal victims of and responsibility bearers for male excess alcohol consumption, (b) potential ‘crisis-women’ whose unpatriotic drinking choices (whether English tea, French champagne or American cocktails) denoted their prioritising of fashion over fascist values and (c) gatekeepers of family alcohol consumer practices and consumers of alcohol in their own right. While the production of legislation, rhetoric and propaganda on alcohol consumption was dominated by men, women were identified as key constituents whose alcohol-related practices could make or break the causes of fascist propagandists, ‘anti-alcohol’ campaigners and alcohol industry associations. The history of alcohol production and consumption in Italy during the fascist dictatorship has only recently received attention alcohol's gendered dimensions, especially women's drinking, have been hitherto overlooked. This article examines discourses and practices around women's drinking in Fascist Italy.
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