Wine, Women, & Substance Abuse: A Discussion with Betsy Ettore

On Wednesday, 25^th March 2026, Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Ettore and I sat down on Teams to discuss her research.

JB: Lovely seeing you, Betsy. Let’s start. You were born in Connecticut and educated at Fordham University in New York and then at the LSE in London, where you did your PhD. After posts in London (including the Institute of Psychiatry and my college Birkbeck, University of London in the 1980s), Finland, and Plymouth, you settled at the University of Liverpool where you are currently Professor Emerita. You have an impressive publication record. I counted at least 13 books, 50 chapters in edited volumes, over 60 articles in journals, as well as edited volumes, official reports, reviews, and work in the media. It is your distinguished career as a feminist sociologist who has made important interventions in a vast array of fields that interests me.

EE: Oh, Birkbeck! I loved it. It was my best job. It was 1986-1989. I worked with Susan McGregor. I don’t know if you know of her, but she’s very well known in the drugs field. A lovely woman.

JB: Yes! I did know her, although not personally. I am in History not Sociology, but I really appreciated her interventions as a colleague at Birkbeck.

In ten or so minutes, I want to talk to you about your work on harmful alcohol drinking but, before that, can you tell us about your other research? I am thinking of your work on reproductive genetics and the sociology of lesbianism.

EE: Reproductive genetics came midway in my career because I was living in Finland for seven years from 1991 to 1998. My interest in reproductive genetics began during that time. It was all about needing work as a foreigner because it was very hard to get any sort of post here, even temporary post, unless you spoke the language. It’s very different now but, in those days, you needed Finnish to be able to survive in the academic life. So, I met a doctor who worked in a government post and was doing quite a lot of research on women’s issues, and she asked me to put together a European Union project on prenatal screening, which included genetic screening. I started to get interested in genetic technologies and looked at it from a feminist point of view. I worked on a proposal for the European Union, which included four countries, the UK, Finland, Greece, and the Netherlands. We got the money! I was able to continue that work when I moved to Plymouth in 1998. It was a four-year project. The project was very successful. I met a lot of great people. Studying experts in the four countries was fascinating because you could see significant differences between the countries.

So: that was mid-career while the sociology of lesbianism was the beginning of my career because I did the first PhD on sociology of lesbianism in the UK. It was at the LSE. I started in 1973 and finished in 1977. Everybody was flabbergasted that I had a male supervisor, a wonderful man named Terence Morris. He was a Catholic and was very fond of me because he knew that I had been a Catholic nun for about four years when I was quite young, after high school. He also knew my Jesuit professor, Father Joe Fitzpatrick at Fordham [University]. So, he was really open with me, and he helped me immensely with my research in terms of how to do participant observation. All my feminist friends were shocked because they thought he was just a typical misogynist, but he wasn’t. He really helped me out.

My PhD was full of data because I did a survey, much to the horror of people then, because most people doing PhDs were doing historical work – they weren’t doing surveys, that’s for sure. I did interviews; I did participant observation. The PhD was called ‘The Sociology of Lesbianism, Female “Deviance” (an aside: in inverted comments!) and Female Sexuality’. The main thesis was that instead of being ‘deviant’, lesbianism involved a high level of social organisation and was just another way to be a woman in society. I tried to contextualise lesbian in society in a very sociological way; normalising it, basically. Luckily, I got a contract for my first book, Lesbians, Women, and Society, with Routledge, and it was published in 1980 [and reissued in 2024 as a Classic].

JB: That’s great!

EE: I continued my interest in lesbians, but it was impossible at that time to get a job after doing that PhD [on lesbians], except at the Institute of Psychiatry. And the researchers there were only interested in ‘deviance’. I was able to get a job there because Terry [Morris] knew Griffith Edwards, who was the head of the unit.

JB: Was this when you became interested in autoethnography as a feminist methodology? Or did that become later?

EE: That came much later, when I was at Liverpool, or a little bit before. I met Carolyn Ellis, who was the instigator of autoethnography. She and her partner Arthur Bochner were at the University of South Florida. It started very much on an academic level. I used to go every year to the American Sociology Association conferences, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to them, but they’re huge – about 10,000 sociologists descend upon a city. And there are places for publishers to meet – you can get contracts for books if you ‘butter up’ the publishers and you can even give them a book proposal at the conference! I was given a book called The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, which was edited by Norman Denzin. It was a huge book, about 600 pages. They were giving it away for free, so I took a copy. I thought this will be interesting. It included a study on autoethnography written by Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, her husband. I saw it as a way to do autobiographical writing – but in a particular way. And I wanted to do it in a way that would include feminism, because I saw it as really looking at the ‘I’ and placing the ‘I’ firmly within a cultural context, with all that implies.

At the time, I had been suffering from a thyroid problem, so I decided I was going to write about that. One of the things you’ll notice when you look at my CV, I’ve published a lot in Women’s Studies International Forum. It’s my favourite journal! So that was where I published my first autoethnographic article there – exploring my awful experience with my thyroid problem. I initially wanted to publish it in, for instance, Sociology of Health and Illness, but they wouldn’t have it. They didn’t see autoethnography as a viable way of doing research or even as a sociological method. This was very disappointing because there were people doing autoethnography.

JB: Can I just ask you a question here? I’m an historian and most of the people reading my blogs are historians, although there are quite a few anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, too. Can you tell us about what you mean by autoethnography – especially autoethnography as a feminist method? As I understand it, it involves paying attention to the intersections between the personal and the political. I can even quote you here: you say that you want to ‘present embodied experience and emotions in order to demonstrate how these happenings and feelings are emblematic of wider political meanings and social trends’. Talk us through that!

EE: I see autoethnography as an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness connecting the personal to the cultural. I’m going to quote from my book: ‘Autoethnography (AE) is a reformulation of the traditional binary emic (observed) and etic (observer) positions with emphasis on research process (graphy), culture (ethnos) and self (auto). Culture is very important in this whole mix. And you write in the first person, looking back and forth through an ethnographic lens. You’re focusing outward on the cultural and aspects of your personal experience. And then you’re looking inward, exposing your vulnerable self moved by refracting and resisting cultural interpretations.’ This is a process that feminism is also all about; there’s constantly that tension between culture, yourself and politics and how you express yourself as a political person. Does that make it a little bit clearer?

JB: That’s very helpful. It is a much more self-reflective process, yes, it is cultural and social but also political.

EE: Yes. I was lucky: just after I retired, I was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Researcher grant. Anyone with a connexion with a university in the UK can apply for these [after retirement]. So, I received some funding for a year to visit people and talk about autoethnography. I was able to spend time at the University of South Florida just before Carolyn Ellis retired, and I met her students and got an insight into how students were engaging with it. So that was an interesting experience for me. It enabled me to write my book [Autoethnography as Feminist Method: Sensitizing the Feminist ‘I’ (Routledge 2017)]. I had been intrigued with autobiographical works. In fact, for a couple of years, I was only reading autobiographies. But autoethnography is different: it places things in a political context; you’re exploring feelings in a political context. When I am refereeing autoethnographyy manuscripts for journals, I always point out how important it is that authors reveal their feelings in the context of the situations they find themselves in.

I think this is why it was so difficult for people in sociology to accept autoethnography. They do now, but it’s taken time. They didn’t like it when students talked about feelings. If I think back to Terry [Morris], my supervisor, he said, ‘it’s okay, you can use “I” in your PhD’, which was anathema at the time. I always remember telling that to my student colleagues. Of course, they were so envious that I was able to see Terry almost every two months. They only saw their supervisors once a year. But he always wanted to see me. And it was great because he was giving me good advice that kind of lasted my whole career. The ‘I’ is important in sociology, but I think that for many people, they’re not allowed to use it. It’s political.

JB: I agree! Let’s turn to your work on addiction. As I understand it, you came to the study of addiction in the late 1970s when you were working at in the highly masculinist environment of the Addiction Research Unit [ARU] at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Can you tell us about that experience and the state of research at that time?

EE: Okay, so it was at the same time horrific as well as enlightening. Griffith Edwards, a psychiatrist, was the head of the unit. At that time, he was the leading researcher in the world on addiction. The ARU was funded with money from the Medical Research Council and the DHSS [Department of Health and Social Security] in 1968. All the researchers there were getting to be known in their fields of studies. Griffith had connections with the World Health Organisation and research units in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Researchers all over the world used to visit us. But Griffith was not an easy person to work with; I managed it. The state of research was very extensive: my colleagues and I were examining all aspects of addiction – family life, treatment, recovery, relapse, community services and support, pharmaceuticals. Most of all: it was very patriarchal oriented. Women were missing in the studies. Women were only there as supporters of male addicts or alcoholics. I sometimes felt abused by how these people were treating me, especially the men (i.e. they made sexist jokes, gay jokes), so it was an uncomfortable setting for me. About two or three years being there, I made a conscious decision: ‘I’m going to do what I have to do to keep this job. I’m going to work here. But in my spare time, I’m going to write about women substance users’. My main work was a study of what used to be called ‘alcohol treatment units’. There were thirty of them around the UK, and I had to visit each one. I had to talk to the psychiatrists who headed these units. And I can remember (this was a turning point for me) sitting down with one consultant psychiatrist (he was very well known and the editor of a famous alcohol journal) who told me, ‘Betsy, we don’t take any patients here who are violent…. Of course, if they beat their wives, we don’t count that as violence’. I was sitting there thinking, ‘oh my God, this is unbelievable’.

Even though they were doing masses of research, it was still very, very focused on men. That was why I started a consciousness raising group for researchers. Not only with women doing addiction research but female researchers generally in universities. We had a great time. We used to meet every three weeks, every month. And these women pointed out to me that I was being sexually harassed by one of my colleagues because he kept on grabbing my arse. And they said: ‘you should complain!’ But I knew that if I complained, nothing would happen. But it was a good support group at that time, for all of us.

The ARU was a very well-known place to be. And, as I say, very well-known people came from all over the world to see Griffith and talk with him. He was seen as this kind of guru. He was the editor of Addiction (at that stage it was the British Journal of Addiction). Griffith was the editor for a very long time.

JB: Yeh, I know a lot about harassment in universities! It was routine.

Much of your focus has been female drinkers, including women who identify as lesbians. In 1997 (I know that’s a long time ago! but it is one of your books that I quote in the current book I am writing) you published Women and Alcohol, A Private Pleasure or a Public Problem. In it, you observed that A.A. [Alcoholics Anonymous] is ‘a male-initiated programme’ and, since it fails to address inequalities, including those of gender, cannot be a conduit for social change. You insisted that consciousness-raising within feminist gatherings would be more deeply restorative than shamefaced confessionals within A.A. circles. Intriguing. Talk us through it.

EE: Well, I still believe that, but unfortunately, AA at the moment wins out because it’s a worldwide movement. And I think that AA is gradually changing, and it is becoming more sensitive to women. But until alcohol recovery includes a feminist perspective, the AA method is going to prevail. Consciousness-raising groups would be much more helpful for women.

I can give an example of how consciousness-raising groups have helped in the area of depression amongst women. My partner, Irmeli Laitinen or Imma her nickname, is a trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She did a PhD on women and depression. And both of us were impressed by a book written by Sheila Ernst and so Lucy Goodin, In Our Own Hands, A Book of Self-Help Therapy [1981]. It’s a wonderful book which talks about how women could come together and do their own consciousness-raising groups; they could search for their own healing. Imma got together groups in Finland (she started the Women’s Therapy Centre in Finland, mirrored on the Women’s Therapy Centre in London) where she got together chronically depressed women who had been for years in the mental health sector and seen as impossible to help. The idea was that if you’re chronically depressed, well, that’s it; you’re not going to be cured. Imma’s thesis was that feminist consciousness-raising method works. These women were doing what she called ‘feeling circles’; they would sit around and talk about why they were depressed, what they were doing about it. They would come and report every week. And these women moved out of their chronic depression. The self-help nature of it was restorative. It made me think that these kinds of consciousness-raising groups are powerful, and I’m sure they would be within AA.

Another important aspect that came out of my discussions with Imma was the distinction between positive and negative drinking. Why does everything have to be about negative drinking. Positive drinking is what we’re aiming for – and especially for women, because one of the things I noticed in the addiction field is that there’s such a double standard. Women alcoholics, women addicts, they’re treated much more harshly than men. And the expectations are much higher on women than they are on men. There is this double standard. And I think this idea of positive and negative drinking may help us to kind of overcome that. But I still think that we need a feminist perspective in this field.

JB: I couldn’t agree more. In fact, in the way I envision my next book, its title is In Praise of Wine and Women! Those positive aspects of drinking are crucial. In fact, I’ve done a lot of work on feminist and lesbian communities from the 1960s onwards, looking at the role that alcohol, particularly wine, played in facilitating ideas, communities, and political feminism. For example, I’ve examined at every issue of the feminist periodical Off Our Backs, tracing the movement from wine being seen as something creating communities amongst women who differ in a lot of ways, to it becoming a problem within the lesbian and feminist communities. I am not denying that there has been some crises of heavy, unhealthy drinking within feminists and lesbians circles, so I don’t ignore the negatives, but it is important to look at the positive aspects as well.

But enough of me! I could talk about this for hours…

Let’s return….

In 2011, nearly 15 years after publishing Women and Alcohol, you co-authored a book entitled Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World. A shift from ‘Women’ to ‘Gender’! Can you tell us about it and how your ideas remained the same or changed between 1997 and 2017? 

EE: It was a big change, of course. It was great to be working with Nancy Campbell [the co-author], who was a dream to work with, a wonderful friend, wonderful colleague from Rensselaer University in Albany, New York. She’s had such a real influence on my thinking. I could probably say that both our books were path-breaking books. For instance, my book, Women in Substance Use, which was published in 1992, and her book, Using Women, Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice, published in 2000, were pathbreaking books in the addiction field and both were very feminist. She is such a forward thinker. We met up a couple of times and then we decided one summer we would go to a women’s retreat, and we wrote a book proposal for this book on gendering addiction. Since that time, she’s been very instrumental in my ways of thinking. We decided we’d write this book together. And I just had such a good time. The book brought together our work up until that time in the addiction field. And we used the term ‘substance use’ rather than ‘addiction’. It made it really expansive.

In that book, we talked about two modes of knowledge that coexist: classical and postmodern modes of knowledge. And we argued that the postmodern way of thinking was more gender sensitive and more conducive to multiple feminisms (or what we called emancipatory and anti-oppressive stances). We focused on the postmodern, but we also saw that the classical mode of thinking in the substance use field was rather obsolete, even essentialist. The key to our thinking was when we started employing the concept ‘epistemologies of ignorance’, which was a term that was used by the scholar Nancy Tuana, when she talked about women’s health movements. Let me read from Nancy Tuana, because her ideas are complex, but very interesting. She wrote:

to fully understand the complex practices of knowledge production and the variety of factors that account for why something is known, we must also understand the practices that account for not knowing … our lack of knowledge about a phenomenon … [A]n account of the practices that resulted in a group unlearning what was once a realm of knowledge … [means] we must … examine the ways in which not knowing is sustained and … constructed … Any effort to understand ignorance [must] recognize that it is a complex phenomenon which, like knowledge, is situated.

So, basically in the addiction field, ignorance is really embedded in treatment and research. We wanted to know how addiction knowledge can be constructed and produced by knowing and not knowing practices. In the book, we also talk about multiple ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ and how these epistemologies work alongside kind of gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized lines to make knowing what women need difficult to discern in the addiction field.

Also in the book is the notion of embodied deviance. In other words, moving on from my earlier days of talking about ‘deviance’ to ‘embodied deviance’ which implies an embodiment perspective or a focus on the importance of the body. Also, I talk about reproductive regimes, a notion which I employed earlier. I want to point out how these regimes surrounding pregnant bodies have a particular negative effect on pregnant women drug users and how these drug using women are controlled by these regimes more harshly than non-drug using women. Lastly, because of my focus on bodies, I talk about ‘epistemologies of embodiment’, alongside ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ in an attempt to demonstrate how knowing and not knowing are indeed embodied experiences.

JB: I am so grateful for the opportunity to talk to you. Is there anything else you would like to mention or to talk about. What about your new projects?

EE: Well, I’m ‘in between’ [projects]. As I mentioned, I had been in a convent in Connecticut after high school. I was young, only eighteen, and I was there for four years. It had a real impact on my life. On a monthly basis, I meet up with the seven women that entered the convent with me and also left the convent. I’m thinking of doing a memoir with them. I’m not sure. We have talked about it but some of these women don’t like to write. So let’s see.

JB: Oh! I would love to read your autobiography! There are so many different parts of your life that I would be curious to see how you bring them together. It would be fantastic. I am just nudging you in that direction [laughs]. What a pleasure talking with you.

If you are interested in this interview with Betsy Ettore or simply curious about the history of alcohol-drinking, take a look at my interviews with Bob Fuller on religion and wine and Robin Room on wine and addiction.