Abstract

"You’ve Probably Heard of Her Husband: Gender, Beer, and Archiving"

Tiah Edmunson-Morton, Oregon State University (edmunsot@oregonstate.edu)

The story of women and brewing transcends time and location – it is the story of invisible work and advantages of proximity. Throughout history and across cultures, mythical female deities and real women brewed. In Medieval Europe, alewives or brewsters made and sold ale, ran taverns, and played a vital role in community life. Women on homesteads in Colonial America brewed beer for their families and sold it to their communities, using local ingredients and traditional methods. This changed with the wave of 19th century industrialization, which effectively excluded women from professional brewing roles and hid their informal, domestic work related to alcohol while they were married. Overwhelmingly, any U.S. woman who identified as a brewer did so after her husband died and if the brewery was open when he died, she inherited it.

Women married to brewers in 19th century Oregon were no different, and while living in the West offered unique, albeit constrained, opportunities for women, like others in the industrialized Midwest and throughout the rest of the country, nearly all inherited brewery businesses. Victoria Bauerlin, the first and youngest, was 19, had two children under 3, when she inherited a small facility next to her house. Louisa Weinhard, the last to inherit before Prohibition, was 71, had two adult daughters married to brewery managers, and inherited a large factory next to her house. For all, the length of their involvement largely hinged on complex intersections of family duty, economic needs, social and legal constraints, remarriage, and the proximity of the brewery to the home.

Through the lens of my research on a book project focused on 19th century brewing in Oregon and my work as curator of the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, this paper argues for a more inclusive and nuanced approach to documenting brewing history. This includes the contributions of wives and widows from the past, but also of contemporary figures—brewers, restaurant managers, bookkeepers, chemists, and the silent partners with external jobs—whose roles collectively shape the 21st century industry.