It’s a long hard slog pushing for equality in the drinks industry. In beer, we’ve had a notably strenuous and draining few years since the industry’s ‘watershed moment’ in May 2021, when hundreds of stories of prejudice, abuse, and violence worldwide were shared on Instagram. This forced a collective eye-opening to the reality of the non-cis white male beer industry experience.
We’ve spoken up, spoken out, organized, protested, boycotted, and fundraised. And while the fight is so far from over that stopping for breath might feel like a bit of an indulgence, it’s one that most of us need – along with a high-quality beverage.
Mallory O’Meara’s Girly Drinks is just the tonic for the sapped brain of the exhausted activist. While I doubt that this was what O’Meara had in mind when writing the book, her joyful jaunt through women’s history as trailblazing creators, purveyors, champions, and indulgers of alcohol manages to cheer, educate, and inspire all at once.
Even the most jaded, burned-out drinks industry feminist will revel in O’Meara’s glowing descriptions of Cleopatra’s fabulously named inimitable Livers drinking club, Mary Frith running her cutpurse operation out of her local tavern, and Li Qingzhao’s boozy poetry rejoicing in wine consumption.
As well as dating the earliest brewing to women in ancient Mesopotamia, O’Meara credits alchemist and writer Maria the Jewess with the first invention of the distillation still. In O’Meara’s story, women are the essence, the backbone of all that is boozy.
While the book sets out to tell this history of women in alcohol through fifteen individual stories, the content is even richer than advertised. As we ricochet around the globe, it’s impossible not to be in awe of O’Meara’s no-stone-unturned research, diving into drinks cultures as diverse as ruou in Vietnam, omaongo and oshinwayin Namibia, and early Japanese sake (kuchikami) – all produced by women.
Some stories are well-known, like the role of Hildegard von Bingen in introducing hops into brewing (but did you know she also wrote in praise of the female orgasm? Ha!). Others turn perceived histories on their heads, a particularly striking example being the existence of fermented alcoholic beverages in Indigenous American society before European colonizers, such as tula-pah brewed by Chiricahuas women and tiswan by Tohono O’odham women.
Another is the importance of women, specifically the WONPR (Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Repeal), spearheaded by Pauline Sabin’s role in ending Prohibition. “Never underestimate a group of well-off and pissed-off mothers,” O’Meara says pointedly.
She also repairs reputations that have historically been unfairly maligned, including that of Sunny Sund, owner of the famous Beachcomber Tiki Bar chain, previously ‘cast as the villain who stole the Beachcomber’ but who was both the brains and power behind the whole operation, and Lucha Reyes, queen of mariachi music, whose tragic death cast a harsh shadow over the powerful way she took on macho Mexican drinking culture with her song La Tequilera and her adoption of traditionally male cancion ranchera music.
There are women you may have yet to hear of despite the enormous strides they have made for their industries. As an avid Scotch whiskey drinker, I felt somewhat abashed not to have known that one of my favorite brands, Laphroaig, was owned for 18 years by the groundbreaking Bessie Williamson, whose passion and tenacity popularized the drinking of Islay single malt and brought Scotch to America as the Scotch Whiskey Association’s American spokesperson.
Similarly, the story of Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela, South Africa’s first Black female brewery founder and the first person from South Africa to earn a National Diploma in clear fermented beverages, should have been right in my wheelhouse as a beer writer, but I heard it first from O’Meara. Queer and trans women’s histories are included, from 17th Century French lesbian cafes to A Year of Queer Cocktails, the first (known) cocktail book written by a trans woman.
Many of the themes running through O’Meara’s book are familiar to those with a rudimentary knowledge of alcohol history – that production of much alcohol in many locations originated in the home, as the purview of women, both as a way for them to provide sustenance to their families and to earn often-essential extra cash. The fact that women were forced out of their markets by a combination of patriarchy and capitalism isn’t a great secret. However, the depth and breadth of examples that Girly Drinks offers add new dimensions to this well-known narrative.
Similarly, while the gendering of drinking spaces and drinks continues to be a problematic element of the alcohol industry, O’Meara traces the roots of these issues back through history, drawing maps of segregation with a very long route. O’Meara rightly points out that, although she traces women’s oppression in alcohol (among many other arenas) to 1754 BCE’s Code of Hammurabi, this is not a localized or nationalized issue.
The parallels she draws from around the world of men’s stripping of women’s rights to make and sell alcohol and drink it and the similarities in how they have fought back are striking. Colonization, capitalism, and religious pressures have all taken their toll on women’s liberty as alcohol producers and consumers, with forced closures of female enterprises from shebeens of feudal Scotland to Mexico’s pulquerias – both of which fought back by going underground.
Be it alewives defying the Christian church’s efforts to paint them as witches to South African women defending their right to brew utywala with spears, women have a history of reclaiming our spaces as drinks mavens, whatever hardships the patriarchy throws at us.
While never downplaying or sidelining the importance and necessity of reclaiming women’s roles in drinks history and culture, O’Meara’s light touch and witty, personal asides make the book feel less like a treatise on the way that patriarchy has shaped our perceptions of women’s relationships to alcohol, both as creators and drinkers, and more like a much-needed celebration of some truly remarkable women and their incredible pioneering achievements in and around the world of booze. I’m barely scratching the surface of the book’s rich and engaging content. This review barely scrapes the tip of the iceberg regarding the book’s 350 pages of women’s beer history, all helpfully indexed.
O’Meara is a storyteller, and the fun, gossipy vignettes that pepper Girly Drinks enhance the book’s readability for those outside the drinks industry and for those who may not usually pick up a work of feminist drinks history. However, while being perfect beer event or cocktail party anecdotes, these are also histories to be drawn on for strength and inspiration as we plow on in the face of opposition that can feel as relentless as the myth of Sisyphus.
As O’Meara smartly asserts, “Patriarchal oppression and misogynistic societal expectations play the biggest roles in a culture’s drinking habits. The double standard that drinking women face is deeply rooted in male anxieties about control and their fear of 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.”
Next time a beer bro gets in your face, channel your inner Catherine the Great and give him a right royal taking down.
Girly Drinks by Mallory O’Meara is published by Hanover Square Press.
