Dan Malleck

Cultural pastime, profitable industry, or harmful influence on the nation? Liquor was a tricky issue for municipal, provincial, and federal governments after Confederation. Liquor and the Liberal State traces the Ontario provincial government’s takeover of liquor regulation by in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how notions of individual freedom, equality, and property rights were debated, challenged, and modified in response to an active prohibitionist movement and equally active liquor industry. The drink question became as political as it was moral – a key issue in the establishment of judicial definitions of provincial and federal rights and, ultimately, in the crafting of the modern state.

Drink and Order before Prohibition

Liquor and the Liberal State

Cheryl Krasnick Warsh

Positioning consumer culture in Canada within a wider international context, Consuming Modernity explores the roots of modern Western mass culture between 1919 and 1945, when the female worker, student, and homemaker relied on new products to raise their standards of living and separate themselves from oppressive traditional attitudes. Mass-produced consumer products promised to free up women to pursue other interests shaped by marketing campaigns, advertisements, films, and radio shows. Concerns over fashion, personal hygiene, body image, and health reflected these new expectations. This volume is a fascinating look at how the forces of consumerism defined and redefined a generation.

Gendered Behaviour and Consumerism before the Baby Boom

Consuming Modernity

The prohibition era of gangsters and bootleggers has captured our imagination. But what happened when the government turned the taps back on? Dan Malleck shows that, contrary to popular belief, post-prohibition Ontario was an age when the government struggled to please both the “wets” and the “dries.” Rather than pandering to temperance groups, officials sought to define and promote manageable drinking spaces in which citizens would follow the rules of proper drinking and foster self-control. Post-prohibition liquor control was not a restrictive regulatory force but rather something more pragmatic – a bureaucratic attempt to balance temperance with recognition that prohibition was unsustainable.

Dan Malleck

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