Mallory O'Meara loves a drink.
So much so, that she decided to learn about our long relationship with alcohol, delving into book after book on the topic.
"But I [soon] noticed that there was no women's history in any of them … I was very frustrated," the American author tells ABC RN's Saturday Extra.
"I knew there had to be a history there. I just absolutely refused to believe that women were not involved in the history of wine and beer and whiskey and distilling and bars."
She was right. After doing her own research, scouring thousands of years of history, O'Meara came to one big conclusion.
"When did we start roping off certain types of booze with a pink frilly ribbon and condemning them as girly drinks? And why is marking a drink feminine a bad thing in the first place?" she asks in her latest book Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol.
"The truth is, all drinks are girly drinks. Not just because women have been drinking since alcohol was invented, but because they've been making and serving it since the beginning too."
Ancient times
Humans first started to intentionally prepare alcohol around 10,000 years ago, and women played a central role right from the start.
"In the early days, when brewing was invented, and alcohol really first started becoming an important part of society, it was completely a women's industry," O'Meara says.
"It was the priestesses of temples who made it. The goddesses of alcohol all over the world were generally female."
In ancient Mesopotamia, Ninkasi was the goddess of beer and brewing. The first large-scale brewers in this area were the Ninkasi priestesses (who were also paid in beer).
But O'Meara says this changed thanks to a Babylonian king named Hammurabi, due to a legal text he issued in around 1750 BCE, called the Code of Hammurabi.
"[Some] people learn in schools that it was the foundation of civilization … but what they don't teach you in schools is it also established the idea of women being the property of men," she says.
"So women went from controlling beer and controlling the brewing industry to, if women were found drinking or going into drinking places, they could be put to death."
She says it was a huge moment in history, "not just for civilization, but also for women's rights".
"It was the first dark day."
Successes around the world
The dark days for women continued.
Many countries imposed restrictions around women making or drinking alcohol. Look no further than Australia, where in one state, it was prohibited to serve women alcohol in a public bar until 1970.
But women continued to play a vital, if unappreciated, role in this history.
In the 12th century, German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was the first person to write scientifically about using hops in beer as a preservative.
This was a massive development.
As O'Meara writes: "Adding hops prevented the growth of bacteria in the beer, meaning it stayed fresh longer and it could travel. It could even be exported … [Hildegard] helped change the course of the entire beer industry".
Fast forward to the 1800s, to Barbe-Nicole Clicquot in France.
As O'Meara puts it: "The name you should think of when someone mentions champagne is Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, the grand dame of sparkling wines".
The Widow Clicquot, as she was known, took over her husband's wine business in her 20s. She developed her own method of removing yeast debris, and then took her drinks to the world.
"The method she and [cellar master] Antoine Müller developed completely revolutionised sparkling wine. 'Remuage sur pupitre' is still used in many champagne houses to this day … Veuve Clicquot was the brand responsible for internationalising the champagne market."
Around this time on the other side of the world, Tatsu'uma Kiyo was building the largest saké empire in Japan.
Kiyo was the daughter of a brewing dynasty, but at the time, women were not allowed to run such businesses. So she did so from behind the scenes.
"Kiyo hired a 'bantō', a male clerk that she trusted completely and trained to essentially be her deputy. He handled all the open negotiations and face-to-face meetings, while she stayed behind the scenes, pulling all the strings. With this facade in place, Kiyo began to build herself an empire."
At one point, Kiyo was "making three times as much saké as her nearest competitor. For 50 years, hers was by far the largest and most prosperous saké brewery in Japan".
Prohibition in the US
Women played a major role in the years of American prohibition — when alcohol was outlawed from 1920 to 1933 — which ripple through to this day.
First up, women were heavily involved in the smuggling trade.
"Women actually were more successful at smuggling during prohibition and smuggled more alcohol than men," O'Meara says.
"In the early days, all the enforcement agents were men. In a lot of states, they weren't allowed to search women, because of propriety … So the women took advantage of this and filled up their skirts and prams and boots and all kinds of things [with alcohol]."
One of the key players at the time was Gertrude Lythgoe, who O'Meara calls "quite literally the most successful and famous international bootlegger in the world".
Lythgoe operated out of the Bahamas, smuggling boatloads of scotch, whiskey and bourbon into the US.
It was also around this time that American women started to attend and work in the speakeasies.
And as they were used to drinking at home, they brought new skills and ideas.
"This is when cocktails sprang up. Nobody knew more about making cocktails … [than] American housewives. That was their domain — women had been drinking privately in the home for centuries at this point," O'Meara says.
"They were really practised not only in making the alcohol, but also using the ingredients that were in their kitchens … A lot of the ingredients that went on to be mixed up in fancy bars and hotels started as things that people found out about at home that were a mum's or grandmother's recipe."
Abuse of booze
But the history of women and alcohol is not only about accomplishments. Far from it.
During her research, O'Meara also learnt about the tragic consequences of women's drinking.
"One of the saddest things about the fact that women were only allowed to drink in private [for much of history], is when there was no one around, it's harder to regulate what you're drinking."
O'Meara says in many countries and at many times, the attitude was that "no one wanted it to get out that a woman had been drinking".
"Because there was such a bias against women drinking, a lot of women who had problems with alcohol were reluctant to go to a doctor to get help," she says.
"It was a really sad thing."
Fighting back
Time and time again, the history of women and alcohol tells a far bigger story about gender.
"The double standard that drinking women face is deeply rooted in male anxieties about control and their fear of women acting like people, not property. If you want to know how a society treats its women, all you have to do is look into the bottom of a glass," O'Meara concludes in her book.
This has been true in Australia. But women have fought back.
In 1965, women were still banned from drinking in public bars in Queensland. So activists Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bogner visited Brisbane's Regatta Hotel, where they chained themselves to the foot rail.
"It's illegal discrimination," Thornton told the ABC in an interview that year.
"One of the things that appalled me when I first came to Queensland, was seeing the women standing on the footpaths waiting around for their men to come out of the bars in Queensland suburbs," she said.
"I think this is an intolerable situation."
Their actions increased public awareness of the issue and five years later, the rules were repealed.
Today, a bar within the Regatta Hotel is named Merle's, in honour of one of the activists.
As O'Meara puts it:
"For thousands of years, raising a toast as a woman was a subversive act. In many places all over the world, it still is. But if they get paid less, withstand more pain and have to fight against more oppression, aren't women more deserving of a goddamn drink?"
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