More fun with statistics: wine edition

[walkitout]

From Gabrielle Glaser's book: "Today, women buy nearly two-thirds of the 784 million gallons of the wine sold in this country, and they drink about 70 percent of what they buy."

It's not unambiguous, but the obvious interpretation is that women are consuming 47% of the wine sold in this country -- which isn't necessarily the impression one would get if one didn't actually sit down and do the math (.3 * .67 + .33 = percentage of wine consumed by men; 1 - that = percentage consumed by women).

I recognize that I am ignoring the statistical impact of people who are not identified as men or women.

ETA: Reading Glaser is like reading Friedan. Why is it that the present is always somehow uniquely more stressful than the past? Also, if no one tracked how much women were drinking in the past, how can we be so sure that women are drinking more now? I'm not really buying a lot of this. The research based parts are okay, but the qualitative analysis is terrible.

Oh boy: she says, "We see it in Richard Louv's powerful book lamenting housebound children, Last Child in the Woods."

I may have to start skimming.

The history overview is terrible. WCTU did not "require" that members be "white, Protestant women born in North America". Catholics were at least nominally welcome, altho it's hard to imagine them being very comfortable around a bunch of people slinging the usual anti-Catholic/nativist/anti-Irish etc. rhetoric. Outreach was done to Native Americans, at at least one Cherokee attended a WCTU convention as a delegate. As for "born in North America", that is unadulterated bullshit. They did a ton of outreach to immigrant communities _in their native languages_, and a lot of it was successful. German speaking WCTU chapters had their own newspaper.

This is execrable.

Says Prohibition wouldn't be achieved without female suffrage so the two groups joined forces -- of course Prohibition preceded female suffrage. *sigh* It's clear Glaser's source on Prohibition had a strong opinion and Glaser made no effort to check it for validity, but instead took the standard approach: pretend that Prohibition was somehow an over the top, class biased response to a non-problem.

Still more complaining on Wednesday: "As states passed no-fault divorce laws, the divorce rate began climbing, reaching an all-time high in 1981, when more than half of all marriages dissolved."

Editor? Editor?

Comments

[rolandgo.livejournal.com]

You need to know the percentage of wine bought by men that women drink to get the total. Or you could just ask for the split of consumption. It's a really weird way to present partial data.