A MAN'S World

BARTENDING HAS EARNED ITSELF A REPUTATION OF BEING A PREDOMINANTLY MASCULINE PROFESSION. BUT FOR THREE WOMEN, THEIR WORK IN THE FIELD HAS SINCE BECOME SECOND NATURE, DEFYING GENDERED CONSTRUCTS BY THRIVING IN WHAT’S TYPICALLY KNOWN AS A ‘MAN’S WORLD’

- MELISSA MAE

When you look back at the origins of bartending or mixology, you’ll often find men behind the bar, making history as famed mixologists who have shaped the cocktail scene. Names like Jerry Thomas, and master of pre-Prohibition cocktails Harry Craddock, the last man to shake a cocktail before the Prohibition era began, tend to come up in conversations. As such, society has the tendency of viewing bartending as a gendered skill, though it most definitely is not anymore with more women joining the profession.

Studies conducted in academic publications like Ava Baron’s Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor have also called out the masculine space of the cocktail industry across the world, citing that women in the past were not allowed to try their hand at bartending as they were not “emotionally or temperamentally suited for the job.” Baron goes on to describe the job requisite as a “sacred professional realms of the male,” and that bartenders “prided themselves on being the priestly overseers of the exclusively male drinking societies.” Of course, that excludes the women who have taken said gendered narratives and defied them by running their own bars in the 1920s and 1930s.

Luckily for us, times have changed and so have the notions of what women can or cannot do. Over the years, women have gotten a lot more vocal and enthusiastic about stepping into male-dominated roles like engineering, construction work and farming.