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Trudy Eden, Sarah Hand Meacham. Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake. (Early America: History, Context, Culture.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 187. $48.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 835, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.835
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Focusing on the understudied topic of the production of alcoholic beverages in the colonial Chesapeake, this book promotes the thesis that from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, women produced alcoholic beverages but men became the dominant producers after that, a shift that “lagged behind Europe, New England, and the Middle Colonies, in terms both of who was making alcoholic drinks and of how they were making them” (p. 3). Sarah Hand Meacham gives conflicting reasons for this delay. Immigration patterns and a dispersed population preoccupied with tobacco monoculture kept men from the practice before the mid-eighteenth century (p. 26). The change that did occur, however, came about not because of increased population density or crop diversification but because of scientific and technological advances “that led men in Europe and America to claim that alcoholic beverage production was chemistry, not cookery, and belonged to men's domain” (p. 135).
