Abstract
The United Kingdom and other Western contexts can be recognised as cultures where heavy episodic drinking is expected, normalised (van Wersch & Walker, 2009) and bound up with recreation and friendships (Niland et al., 2013; Waitt & Clement, 2016). Drinking and clubbing may also be conceptualised as practices of gendered identity formation (Nicholls, 2019) or ways of portraying a ‘youthful’ identity that resists traditional transitions to adulthood (Smith, 2013). A refusal to buy into these kinds of collective practices may be viewed with suspicion and disapproval, social exclusion (Advocat & Lindsay, 2015) or harassment (Herman-Kinney & Kinney, 2013). Sobriety or abstinence may also be met with judgement or stigma if it is assumed to be the result of ‘problem’ drinking or addiction (Scott et al., 2016), yet the experiences of those who give up alcohol remain neglected in academic literature. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interview data, this chapter focuses specifically on the experiences of recently sober women in their 30s, 40s and 50s in the UK who ‘came of age’ during a wider period of social change (including the development of the contemporary Night Time Economy and the increasing targeting of women as a consumer market by the alcohol industry). In this chapter, I examine this cohort’s shifting relationships with alcohol across the life course to date, highlighting the ways in which women may draw on notions of age-appropriate, respectable femininity and successful transitions to adulthood to distance themselves from the drinking self, to contextualise their decision to stop drinking and to construct a ‘good’ sober self in midlife.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Emslie et al. (2015) have described this period as ‘early midlife’.
- 2.
As interviews were a ‘one-off’ occurrence without follow-up contact with the participants, we cannot know whether sobriety was actually sustained longer-term.
- 3.
As I have discussed elsewhere, participants both distanced themselves from traditional recovery communities such as AA and drew on some similar language and ways of framing sobriety (Nicholls, 2021).
References
Advocat, J., & Lindsay, J. (2015). To drink or not to drink? Young Australians negotiating the social imperative to drink to intoxication. Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 139–153.
Barnes, M., & Ward, L. (2015). Older women and alcohol. In P. Staddon (Ed.), Women and alcohol: Social perspectives (pp. 103–118). Policy Press.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. University of California Press.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77–101.
Britton, A., & Bell, S. (2015). Reasons why people change their alcohol consumption in later life: Findings from the Whitehall II cohort study. PLoS One, 10(3), e0119421.
Carah, N., Meurk, C., & Hall, W. D. (2015). Profiling Hello Sunday Morning: Who are the participants? International Journal of Drug Policy, 26(2), 214–216.
Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). The wellness syndrome. Polity Press.
Conroy, D., & de Visser, R. (2015). The importance of authenticity for student non-drinkers: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. Journal of Health Psychology, 20(11), 1483–1493.
Day, K., Gough, B., & McFadden, M. (2004). “Warning! Alcohol Can Seriously Damage Your Feminine Health”: A discourse analysis of recent British newspaper coverage of women and drinking. Feminist Media Studies, 4(2), 165–183.
Denzin, N. K. (1993). The alcoholic society: Addiction and recovery of the self. Transaction Publishers.
Emslie, C., Hunt, K., & Lyons, A. (2012). Older and wiser? Men’s and women’s accounts of drinking in early mid-life. Sociology of Health & Illness, 34(4), 481–496.
Emslie, C., Hunt, K., & Lyons, A. (2015). Transformation and time-out: The role of alcohol in identity construction among Scottish women in early midlife. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26(5), 437–445.
Fenton, L. (2018). Practices of learning, earning and intimacy in women’s drinking biographies. PhD thesis, The University of Manchester.
Graber, R., de Visser, R., Abraham, C., Memon, A., Hart, A., & Hunt, K. (2016). Staying in the ‘sweet spot’: A resilience-based analysis of the lived experience of low-risk drinking and abstention among British youth. Psychology and Health, 31(1), 79–99.
Griffin, C., Bengry-Howell, A., Hackley, C., Mistral, W., & Szmigin, I. (2009). ‘Every time I do it I absolutely annihilate myself’: Loss of (self-) consciousness and loss of memory in young people’s drinking narratives. Sociology, 43(3), 457–476.
Herman-Kinney, N. J., & Kinney, D. A. (2013). Sober as deviant: The stigma of sobriety and how some college students “stay dry” on a “wet” campus. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 42(1), 64–103.
Herring, R., Bayley, M., & Hurcombe, R. (2014). “But no one told me it’s okay to not drink”: A qualitative study of young people who drink little or no alcohol. Journal of Substance Use, 19(1–2), 95–102.
Hood, C. D. (2003). Women in recovery from alcoholism: The place of leisure. Leisure Sciences, 25(1), 51–79.
Humphreys, K. (2000). Community narratives and personal stories in Alcoholics Anonymous. Journal of Community Psychology, 28(5), 495–506.
Jackson, S., & Scott, S. (2010). Theorizing sexuality. Open University Press.
Killingsworth, B. (2006). ‘Drinking stories’ from a playgroup: Alcohol in the lives of middle-class mothers in Australia. Ethnography, 7(3), 357–384.
Lyons, A. C., & Willott, S. A. (2008). Alcohol consumption, gender identities and women’s changing social positions. Sex Roles, 59(9–10), 694–712.
MacLean, S., Pennay, A., & Room, R. (2018). ‘You’re repulsive’: Limits to acceptable drunken comportment for young adults. International Journal of Drug Policy, 53, 106–112.
MacLean, S., Savic, M., Pennay, A., Dwyer, R., Stanesby, O., & Wilkinson, C. (2019). Middle-aged same-sex attracted women and the social practice of drinking. Critical Public Health, 29(5), 572–583.
McIntosh, J., & McKeganey, N. (2000). Addicts’ narratives of recovery from drug use: Constructing a non-addict identity. Social Science and Medicine, 50(10), 1501–1510.
Nairn, K., Higgins, J., Thompson, B., Anderson, M., & Fu, N. (2006). ‘It’s just like the teenage stereotype, you go out and drink and stuff’: Hearing from young people who don’t drink. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(3), 287–304.
Newman, H., & Nelson, K. A. (2021). Mother needs a bigger “helper”: A critique of “wine mom” discourse as conformity to hegemonic intensive motherhood. Sociology Compass, e12868.
Nicholls, E. (2019). Negotiating femininities in the neoliberal night-time economy: Too much of a girl? Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicholls, E. (2021). Sober rebels or good consumer-citizens? Anti-consumption and the ‘enterprising self’ in early sobriety. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520981837
Niland, P., Lyons, A. C., Goodwin, I., & Hutton, F. (2013). “Everyone can loosen up and get a bit of a buzz on”: Young adults, alcohol and friendship practices. International Journal of Drug Policy, 24(6), 530–537.
Office for National Statistics. (2018). Adult drinking habits in Great Britain: 2017. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/drugusealcoholandsmoking/bulletins/opinionsandlifestylesurveyadultdrinkinghabitsingreatbritain/2017
Pape, H., Rossow, I., & Brunborg, G. S. (2018). Adolescents drink less: How, who and why? A review of the recent research literature. Drug and Alcohol Review, 37, 98–114.
Peel, N., Bartlett, H., & McClure, R. (2004). Healthy ageing: how is it defined and measured? Australasian Journal on Ageing, 23(3), 115–119.
Perrier, M. (2013). Middle-class mothers’ moralities and ‘concerted cultivation’: Class others, ambivalence and excess. Sociology, 47(4), 655–670.
Rolfe, A., Orford, J., & Dalton, S. (2009). Women, alcohol and femininity: A discourse analysis of women heavy drinkers’ accounts. Journal of Health Psychology, 14(2), 326–335.
Romo, L. K., Dinsmore, D. R., Connolly, T. L., & Davis, C. N. (2015). An examination of how professionals who abstain from alcohol communicatively negotiate their non-drinking identity. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 43(1), 91–111.
Romo, L. K., Dinsmore, D. R., & Watterson, T. C. (2016). “Coming out” as an alcoholic: How former problem drinkers negotiate disclosure of their nondrinking identity. Health Communication, 31(3), 336–345.
Rose, N. (1998). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge University Press.
Sanders, J. (2019). Resistance and fitting in: A qualitative analysis of young women in Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 37(4), 442–461.
Scott, A., Anderson, A., Harper, K., & Alfonso, M. L. (2016). Experiences of students in recovery on a rural college campus: Social identity and stigma. SAGE Open, 6(4), 1–8.
Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of class and gender: Becoming respectable. Sage.
Smith, O. (2013). Holding back the beers: Maintaining ‘youth’ identity within the British night-time leisure economy. Journal of Youth Studies, 16(8), 1069–1083.
Staddon, P. (2015). What alcohol support women say they need: Evidence from service user-led research and practice. In P. Staddon (Ed.), Women and alcohol: Social perspectives (pp. 211–228). Policy Press.
Thurnell-Read, T. (2011). Off the leash and out of control: Masculinities and embodiment in Eastern European stag tourism. Sociology, 45(6), 977–991.
Twigg, J. (2012). Adjusting the cut: Fashion, the body and age on the UK High Street. Ageing and Society, 32(6), 1030–1054.
Vaadal, K., & Ravn, S. (2021). ‘It feels like life is narrowing’: Aspirational lifestyles and ambivalent futures among Norwegian ‘Top Girls’. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038521997759
van Wersch, A., & Walker, W. (2009). Binge-drinking in Britain as a social and cultural phenomenon: The development of a grounded theoretical model. Journal of Health Psychology, 14(1), 124–134.
Vares, T. (2009). Reading the ‘sexy oldie’: Gender, age(ing) and embodiment. Sexualities, 12(4), 503–524.
Waitt, G., & Clement, S. (2016). Women drinking alcohol: Assembling a perspective from a Victorian country town, Australia. Gender, Place and Culture, 23(8), 1121–1134.
Ward, L., Barnes, M., & Gahagan, B. (2011). Alcohol use in later life–older people’s perspectives. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults, 12(4), 239–247.
West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society, 1, 125–151.
Wilkinson, S. (2016). Young people’s alcohol-related urban im/mobilities. In T. Thurnell-Read (Ed.), Drinking dilemmas: Space, culture and identity (pp. 132–159). Routledge.
Acknowledgements
This project was supported by internal funding (project number HM00068) from the University of Portsmouth. Thank you to the external partner, Stephanie Chivers from ichange21, for all of her support throughout the project, and to all the participants who gave up their time to share their ‘sobriety stories’.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nicholls, E. (2022). ‘There’s Nothing Classy About a Drunk 40-year-old’: The Role of ‘Respectable’ Femininity in the Drinking Biographies and Sobriety Stories of Midlife Women. In: Thurnell-Read, T., Fenton, L. (eds) Alcohol, Age, Generation and the Life Course. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04017-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04017-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-04016-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-04017-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)