In late nineteenth-century France, alcoholism was defined in public debates and medical literature as a male problem. In the light of this public silence on female alcoholism, asylum records can provide information about the reactions of psychiatrists and families to extreme cases of female alcohol abuse. Based on the records of one Parisian asylum, Sainte-Anne, this article argues that in their daily practice of asylum medicine, psychiatrists developed a functional definition of female alcoholism that was not unsympathetic to women patients. Asylum records also indicate that working-class families had their own standards of acceptable drinking by women. When these norms were violated and when informal methods of treatment failed, families turned to the asylum as a detoxification facility.
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