Showing results for "Alcoholism" in Gender Studies

The new face of risky drinking is female. The problem: a global epidemic of bingeing. The solution: a brave new approach to female recovery. Eight years ago, Ann Dowsett Johnston was an award-winning journalist and vice-principal of McGill University. In private, she was wrestling the demon that had undone her own mother; the same demon increasing numbers of women are now battling across the world: alcohol.

The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude.