Women have had a hard time of it so far as alcohol is concerned. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mothers drinking in pubs were blamed for racial deterioration and hereditary degeneration, the production of enfeebled children, and the decline of Britain as an imperial power. As alcohol came back on the policy agenda in recent years, it was the “ladettes,” young women out for a good time, out drinking at weekends, who were blamed for the rise in binge drinking, even though the statistics showed that men were the great majority of drinkers.

David Gutzke's Women Drinking Out in Britain since the Early Twentieth Century sets out to survey the recent history of women out drinking. The focus of his book is the actual physical presence of women on licensed premises and what facilitated that. Later, he examines some of the responses over time to women in pubs, considered through the prism of the concept of “moral panic.”

From the 1850s, the respectable classes withdrew from licensed premises. But when did they start to come back? Gutzke takes issue with recent research on this question by historians such as Stella Moss and Claire Langhamer. While Moss argues that respectable women used pubs before 1914 and Langhamer taps the Mass Observation Archive to show that women entered pubs during World War II, Gutzke argues that women went into pubs during World War I and stayed there in the interwar years because of the development of the “improved public house.” He agrees that figures also went up during the next war, but he estimates the rise as lower than Langhamer's account suggests. But the big difference was that women returned into the home after 1945 and did not maintain the pub habit.

The book draws on market research and surveys commissioned in the 1940s and after, which Gutzke prefers to data from Mass Observation. It also uses the advertising by which brewers hoped to make pubs appear woman friendly. A telling table (281) summarizes the revolution in women's drinking habits between the mid-1970s and 2000. But the changes itemized—food, the rise of soft drinks—are not female specific. And here we see one limitation of the study.

Much of the book deals with changes in women's drinking habits and their return to the pub, which began from the 1960s and gathered pace in the 1980s. However, many of the issues discussed here are not female specific but rather illustrative of changes that have led to a rise in alcohol consumption across British society, among them the doubling of wine consumption between 1975 and 1985; the rapid expansion of wine bars which provided a more woman-friendly environment (with toilets) in which to drink; changes in the tied house system from the late 1980s, which required the conservative brewing establishment to divest itself of large numbers of pubs; the rise of new chains such as Wetherspoons, which served food and welcomed families.

Some developments also stimulated a more general rise in youth drinking, rather than an increase that was female specific, although these changes did have an influence on young women's drinking. The late 1980s and 1990s were years of dance drugs and raves, and the pub was in decline. From the early 1990s, however, a “recreational drug war” (96) began to attract young people back into pubs. Alcopops, vertical drinking establishments, a new culture of intoxication with shots and speed dating: all of these things were aided by the arrival of the “nighttime economy” and the liberalization of licensing laws in the early twenty-first century. But the segmentation of the market was mainly by age rather than by gender.

In two final chapters, which sit oddly with the chronology of the book, Gutzke returns to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the two world wars. He draws parallels with fears and responses before 1914 and those in more recent times from 1990 to 2014. “Moral panics” about women's drinking marked society at these earlier periods and during both wars. These historical parallels are apposite, but the material in them would have been better placed earlier in the book than in a concluding comment.

Women's drinking outside the pub, and especially at home, has little place in this book, and yet consideration of that dimension is an essential part of the picture. “Misery drinking” was how the consumption of alcohol by women at home with children was characterized in the 1970s. By the 2000s, it was “preloading,” with supermarket purchased alcohol for young women prior to a night out. The home has also emerged as a site for older drinkers (both male and female), whose consumption has come onto the policy agenda more recently. And some aspects of women's drinking have been detached from any specific location—witness the debates about drinking in pregnancy that focused on the pub in Edwardian times, but no longer now. Gutzke has argued, in other work, for the transfer of American Progressivism into the English brewing establishment in the early twentieth century. More recently American influence has been demonstrated in the attempts to make abstinence the default option for pregnant women. Now, too, there is the rise of a nondrinking culture in Britain with consumption dropping, especially among young people, including young women. The period of moral panic that Gutzke highlights may be over. The focus of this book is really the remaking of the pub—Gutzke's topic in an earlier work—and where women come in to that story. Women's drinking and how society responds to it is a bigger and ever-changing picture.