Her Best-Kept Secret

Journalist Gabrielle Glaser explores the reasons behind why women are drinking more often than ever, and in ever-larger quantities.

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By every quantitative measure researchers can document, women are drinking more. They are being charged more often with drunk driving; they're more frequently measured with high concentrations of alcohol in their bloodstream at the scene of car accidents, and they're more often treated in emergency rooms for being dangerously intoxicated.

The most striking trend: women in their thirties, forties and fifties, who are getting through their days of work, and nights with teething toddlers and trying teenagers, or sick parents, by hitting the bottle. The number of middle-aged women who entered alcohol treatment programs between 1992 and 2007 nearly tripled. That's especially telling: Disappearing for a month or more is difficult for anyone, but it's especially tricky for women who have children at home. Two large federal surveys also found that they have an 80% greater prevalence of having, or at once having had, alcohol dependence than did the generation before them. And, in perhaps the most undeniable statistic of all, they are the consumers whose purchases are fuelling steady growth in the sales of wine. Meanwhile, men's drinking, arrests for drunk driving and alcohol purchases are flat, or falling.

Glaser traces the history of women and alcohol and leads up to today when, for the first time, women are beginning to question the common prescription for abuse: AA. Not only is the message of surrender particularly harmful to women's recovery, but the organization itself has often exposed vulnerable women to male predators. Glaser shows how this problem is beginning to be aired in public, just as a new kind of treatment tailored to women's bodies and psyches, is taking hold.