We are pleased to invite you to the next meeting of the Seminarium Historii Gender (Gender History Seminar), during which Dr Dorota Dias-Lewandowska (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences) will deliver a lecture entitled "Prodigal Wives. Women, Alcohol and Legal Incapacitation in Nineteenth-century Poland". The talk will be commented on by Professor David Clemis (Mount Royal University).
The meeting will take place on 24 February 2026 (Tuesday) at 18:00 at the Faculty of History (Former Museum Building) Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Room A, and online. We warmly encourage in-person attendance. The link to the online meeting can be obtained by contacting us by email at: historia.gender(at)uw.edu.pl
About the book project:
Dorota Dias-Lewandowska: "Prodigal Wives: Women, Alcohol and Legal Incapacitation in Nineteenth-century Poland"
The main sources for this study are court records of the legal incapacitation of men and women due to prodigality. In most cases (around 80–90%), drinking is cited as the primary cause of ruinous behaviour. In the book, I demonstrate how alcohol and drinking were used to discipline and empower women. I also show how, in the era of the medicalisation of drunkenness, being a habitual drunkard remained largely a social construct. My analysis focuses on partitioned Poland, particularly the Austrian-governed region of Galicia, which covers present-day southern Poland (including Krakow) and western Ukraine (including Lviv). Through microhistorical analysis, I contextualise the experiences of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish women from small villages who witnessed the abolition of serfdom, 'Galician poverty' and, ultimately, mass emigration to America within broader European and American discourses on alcohol, medicine, agency, degeneration and emancipation.
Dorota Dias-Lewandowska is an anthropologist and historian, holds a PhD from the Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland) and University Bordeaux Montaigne (France), where she examined the cultural history of French wine in early modern Poland. Co-editor of the series „Studia z historii wina w Polsce” and co-lead of the Drinking Studies Network „Women and Alcohol” research cluster. Currently she is Principal investigator on the „Between the drunken 'mother of destruction’ and the sober ‘angel of the house’. Hidden representations of women’s drinking in Polish and British public discourses in the second half of the 19th century” and “Alcohol, Sobriety and Drunkenness: Discourses on the Boundaries of Drinking in the 19th century Post-Partition Poland” projects where she leads an interdisciplinary research team.
David Celmis is the Academic Director of Liberal Education and an Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His current research focuses on understandings of the nature and character of intoxication and chronic drug and alcohol use in medical, legal, moralistic and popular writings in England from about 1500 to 1830.
