Female Drunkenness

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 11, 1866

Female Drunkenness.

THE Round Table publishes a startling article upon drunkenness among women. It says the vice is prevalent among fashionable ladies, and that some of the most elegant of them will pass the summer, not at Saratoga or Newport as usual, but at an asylum for inebriates. The writer intimates that the vice of fashionable drinking is now more prevalent among the ladies than among the gentlemen of this country; that certain dressmakers make it a point to furnish their customers with drink, while in some stores bottles of wine are also kept on hand for lady shoppers, and in others, merchants allow their boys to go to the nearest bar-room for liquor when ladies desire it. Whisky and brandy are the favorite drinks of these ladies, and as some of the saloons they frequent do not have these liquors on the bill of fare, a neat little sign—“If you do not see what you want, ask for it,” gives the hint to the initiated. In dressmakers’ bills the significant item “small trimmings” often covers up the expense of liquors which the lady has ordered through the modiste who panders to her vitiated taste, while at the watering places a bribe to the waiter procures a secret supply of liquor, which, by the connivance of the landlord, is charged as “extra luncheons.” It is asserted that girls of 18, daughters of most respectable New York merchants, have been seen grossly intoxicated in Broadway stages and upon the public streets, and that no superiority of intellect or social position is sufficient to guard a lady against this vice.