In late 2023, I put the finishing touches to another book chapter that is going to come out later this year in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands, of which I was co-editor along with the dazzling Dr Zalfa Feghali. This chapter has had an interesting life: it started out as a chapter in a book with a very different focus; when that didn’t work out, it was re-written as a journal article; and when that didn’t work out either, it was given a dramatic haircut, moved house, and became something else entirely. This crooked trajectory worked out well, because, first, it afforded me an opportunity to collaborate with an early modern historian with expertise in women’s and gender history, and later, it coincided with the Gender and Borderlands book needing a new roommate (RIP this metaphor!)

As noted in The Dream Team, early modern historian extraordinaire Dr Natasha Bailey  joined the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project as a research associate in mid-2022. Surveying existing historical scholarship about alcohol and race in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century for that project, and reading new stuff on gender for the class on alcohol history I teach, had alerted me to some interesting shifts in the relationship between alcohol consumption and gender in this time period, alongside continuities in the important role women had in the alcohol retail and production fields. Since Natasha’s PhD research had looked in detail at women’s roles in the production and sale of pulque in early modern Mexico, she was the perfect person to co-author the chapter – then on “Alcohol, Gender and Sexuality, 1750-1850” – that I had already agreed to write.

Her expertise on the 16^th and 17^th centuries meant that we could be more confident that the changes and continuities we were describing were truly significant. I should add that pulque is a drink made from the fermented sap of maguey, or agave, plants and tastes like “naughty sourdough sexy times” according to my husband… but that’s probably a post for another time.

Anyway, since this chapter was designed to synthesize a wide range of existing scholarship, the process of co-authoring was quite straightforward. Shout out to Dr Jamie Banks, who had compiled a bibliography of most important works on the subject while he was still the project research associate. We worked our way through this bibliography, curating a set of detailed notes, from which we identified key themes, patterns, and changes across different geographies and over time. These themes became the chapter sections, which we then divided up between us to write. Fun fact: I wrote about 2,000 words of one of my sections during a long layover in Barbados airport!

Once all the sections were written, we probably didn’t spend as much time as we should have done editing, strengthening the arguments, and so on. But that’s okay, because it went on to be revised significantly a further two times in light of the changing publication plans. In the process, the argument became much more centrally focused on the temperance movement, which took shape in many parts of the world in the early nineteenth century. We show how and why a strong nexus between anti-alcohol ideas and gendered ideology was forged in this emergent temperance movement, looking across Britain, Europe, the Americas, and parts of Africa. At the same time, we discuss how alcohol could blur gendered social boundaries and itself crossed borders, both as a commodity and as a set of social norms.

Once the book is further down the production line to publication, I’ll go into more detail on the chapter’s key arguments. We have chosen a book cover, but we still have the exciting world of indexing, copyediting and proofreading ahead of us, we’re expecting it to hit the shelves in the second half of 2024.