Diskurser kring kvinnor i alkoholpolitiska styrdokument 1974 - 2005
The aim of this paper was to examine which discourses of women that could be found in Swedish policy documents concerning alcohol from the seventies until today. The questions asked were in which ways women?s drinking was described and how these descriptions could be analyzed and understood by critical discourse analysis and gender theory. The results indicated two main discourses, one replacing the other over time. According to the first discourse, most clearly expressed in the official report from the seventies, women were not consumers of alcohol to the same extent as men. Their lower consumption was explained structurally, by referring to restricting sex-roles. The next discourse, beginning in the nineties, discussed women as consumers of alcohol. At the same time differences between male and female consumption was emphasized. This was especially manifested by the fact that reasons for women?s drinking were to be searched for on an individual, mostly psychological, level. Frequently young girls, alcohol and sexuality were associated and alcohol-free pregnancies were declared being one of the priority goals for the alcohol policy. Referring to underlying psychological causes women addicted to alcohol were also supposed to need a different and more extensive type of treatment than men.