Banning the barmaid: time,space and alcohol licensing in 1900s Glasgow

This article examines the decision of Glasgow’s magistrates at the beginning of the twentieth century to prohibit the employment of barmaids in the city's public houses, tracing the origins and advocates of the ban as well its effects on the licensed trade and the women who worked behind bars. It responds to Mariana Valverde’s recent work on the relationship between time and space in the operation of law, analysing the ways in which the magistrates sought to differentiate between licensed premises and practices so as to police the gendered boundaries of urban work and leisure culture. By attending to these vital processes of differentiation, in conclusion, it argues for research in social and cultural geography that explicitly connects the experience and management of the temporality of drinking practices to the production and regulation of licensing’s perhaps more obviously spatial geographies.