The sanctuary of sobriety: the emergence of temperance as a feminine virtue in Tudor and Stuart England.

Abstract

This study examines the reasons why temperance was viewed as an appropriate virtue for women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It makes use of contemporary literature to document shifts in attitudes toward women who drank in a public and conspicuous fashion, and examines the economic and cultural changes that contributed to those shifts. The literature consulted in this study would suggest that up until the first decades of the sixteenth century men and women both enjoyed considerable freedom as to where and when they might consume alcohol, and would further suggest that it was only during the economic and social crises of the early modern period that two distinct drinking cultures started to emerge, one centred in the home and exclusive of men, the other centred outside the home and exclusive of women. The emergence of temperance as a virtue specific to women happened to occur at a time when real wages were in sharp decline, and effectively sanctioned the redistribution of household income in favour of men, whose right to drink was never seriously challenged. Criticism of women who drank in a public and conspicuous fashion also happened to coincide with the rediscovery of classical texts commending the supposed temperance of the women of early Rome.