Five years ago, as she was throwing herself into a newfound interest in spirits, cocktails, and mixology, Los Angeles-area writer and podcaster Mallory O’Meara read everything she could find on drinking and making drinks. She was quickly perplexed by what she didn’t come across: much of anything about where and how women fit into that domain. Most every book was written by a man. Most every account featured men.

So, she exhaustively researched and wrote the history herself. In a discussion of her new book Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol with the Library’s Kaite Stover, O’Meara outlines the hidden yet substantial influence that women have had on the world’s alcohol culture – from production to distribution to consumption, from Cleopatra to Thomas Jefferson’s wife Martha to today’s female distillery owners, brewmasters, and award-winning bartenders.

It’s a centuries-long account set against the arc of overall women’s rights across the world. “It was impossible,” O’Meara says, “not to notice how strong the correlation was between a culture that allowed women to drink and a culture that gave women their freedoms.”

O’Meara (bourbon neat, please) previously wrote the acclaimed The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, which she discussed in a Library presentation in October 2019. She also co-hosts the literary podcast Reading Glasses, focusing on books and reading culture, with actress, writer, and director Brea Grant.

Stover is the Library’s director of readers’ services.