Alcohol and the Family in Canada

Abstract

In the context of the family in Western society, alcohol often has been viewed as a problem. This article traces how the use of beverage alcohol in Canada related to the family in the transition from the preindustrial to late-twentieth-century era. Powerful temperance movements in the nineteenth century, and divisive prohibition policies in the early twentieth, attempted to protect the material and moral health of the family. Although liquor laws and social attitudes became more open starting in the 1930s, the medicalized discourse on alcoholism in the 1940s and 1950s was linked to notions of the family. Liberalization of retail and on-premise sales of alcohol in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to portray moderate drinking by adults as “normal” family activity. In the last quarter of the century, a neotemperance movement, reacting to issues such as impaired and driving and teenage drinking, suggested that alcohol’s relationship to the family remained highly ambiguous.