A Hope for Hope: Refocusing Policy on Hopefulness to Support Alcohol Reduction with Midlife Women in Different Social Classes

Our paper will focus on the sociology of hope, and in particular, a call to action for policy makers to create the conditions for hopefulness and embed hope into alcohol reduction policy, advocacy and programs. At present, alcohol reduction strategies convey mostly individualised risk messages and imply personal responsibility for behaviour change, stripped from contexts, and heavy drinking persists among groups. New targeted approaches are necessary considering alcohol harms that address the norms, identities and practices that operate to sustain heavy drinking. We argue that focusing on supporting hopeful futures may create hope for women to reduce alcohol consumption. Our focus on building hope into alcohol reduction strategies intends to shift focus from the individual as the ‘problem’ towards hope being a ‘solution’.

Our paper analyses data from a qualitative study undertaken in Australia with midlife women (aged 45-64 years) from different social classes who consumed different amounts of alcohol. We show how midlife women’s narratives manifest different typologies of hopes (big/small hopes, near/far hopes, achievable/out of reach hopes) according to social class inequities and that unequal distributions of social power hopes available to middle and affluent classes are mediated (even blocked) for working class women, creating a difference in the type of hopes they exhibit and the use of alcohol as an object of hope. We utilise these differentiated (and sometimes stigmatised) hopes to show how, for all midlife women to have agency to reduce alcohol, policy and programs need to enable hopefulness commensurate with contexts that contour women’s hopes – enabling women limited in life chances to imagine hopeful futures. At present, these prospective hopes are often out of reach for women depending on their more or less oppressive social contexts.