Her Best-Kept Secret 1 Lush Solid statistics on women''s drinking habits are hard to come by. In part, that''s because all measures of potentially illicit behavior-sex, drugs, alcohol-are subject to the inherent inaccuracies of self-reporting. ("How many drinks a week?" "I don''t know, Doc-maybe three or four.") There''s also the historic indifference of the mostly male research community to focusing on gender differences in the science of disease. In recent years, however, a critical mass of credible studies have emerged that quantify the anecdotal evidence I had glimpsed in Portland and New York. The findings are incontrovertible. By every quantitative measure, women are drinking more. They''re being charged more often with drunk driving, they''re more frequently measured with high concentrations of alcohol in their bloodstreams at the scene of car accidents, and they''re more often treated in emergency rooms for being dangerously intoxicated.

In the past decade, record numbers of women have sought treatment for alcohol abuse. And, in perhaps the most undeniable statistic of all, they are the consumers whose purchases are fueling steady growth in the sales of wine. Meanwhile, men''s drinking, arrests for drunk driving, and alcohol purchases are flat, or even falling. Contrary to the impression fostered by reality shows and Gossip Girl, young women alone are not responsible for these statistics. There are plenty of girls going wild on the nation''s college campuses, but there is an even more striking trend of women in their thirties, forties, and fifties who are getting through their days of work, and nights with teething toddlers, trying teenagers, or sick parents, by hitting the bottle. The risky habits of young women are well documented in articles, graphic memoirs, and cautionary TV specials. But their stories are more than just sad tales, or the school nurse''s hyperbole: They are a serious public health concern. A national analysis of hospitalizations for alcohol overdose found that the rate of young females age eighteen to twenty-four jumped 50 percent between 1999 and 2008.

In the same period, the rate for young men rose only 8 percent. The most alarming statistic was the sharp rise in the number of young women who turned up at hospitals having OD''d on both drugs and alcohol: That number more than doubled. Among young men, it stayed the same. These data are part of a broader cultural shift in which drinking by women is seen as a proud rite of passage-or, at least, nothing to hide. I once shared a train ride with a loquacious college student who told me she was "practicing drinking" in advance of her planned spring break in Mexico. "It was my mom''s idea, after I got sick over Christmas break from mixing rum with beer," she explained. "She doesn''t want me making a fool of myself in Cabo, so we''re working on getting my tolerance up." Nothing like a little mother-daughter bonding-especially when gals with hollow legs get such respect.

In 2011, students at Rutgers University chose Jersey Shore''s Snooki as a guest speaker on campus. The reality TV star-whose on-camera antics included blackout falls, an arrest for drunken and disorderly conduct, and the admission that she had often gotten so intoxicated she had woken up in garbage cans-was paid thirty-two thousand dollars for her talk. That was two thousand dollars more than writer Toni Morrison received for giving the school''s commencement address six weeks later. Who needs guidance from a Nobel Prize winner when you can get advice like Snooki''s? "Study hard," she told the crowd, "but party harder." Middle-aged women aren''t pounding shots or slurping tequila out of each other''s belly buttons, but they, too, are drinking more than at any time in recent history. Their habits are different from those of their younger sisters. Their beverage of choice, after all, is wine, and their venue is less likely to be public. In fact, the middle-class female predilection for wine seems like it''s just a jolly hobby for time-stretched mothers.

There are T-shirts with a spilled wineglass and the shorthand plea, "Not so loud, I had book club last night." Nearly 650,000 women follow "Moms Who Need Wine" on Facebook, and another 131,000 women are fans of the group called "OMG, I So Need a Glass of Wine or I''m Gonna Sell My Kids." And the wine-swilling mom pops up as a cultural trope, from the highbrow to the mass market. In Jonathan Franzen''s Freedom, Patty Berglund shuffles out for the morning papers every day with the "Chardonnay Splotch," the ruddy face of heavy drinkers. Nic, the driven doctor played by Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, downs her red wine a little too eagerly for her partner''s taste. "You know what, Jules? I like my wine! Okay? So fucking sue me!" In the film Smashed, Kate, the fresh-faced first-grade teacher, wets her bed, throws up in front of her students, and drunkenly steals wine from a convenience store before she sobers up and leaves her drinking-buddy husband. Courteney Cox''s Cougar Town character pours her daily red wine into giant vessels she calls Big Joe, Big Carl, and Big Lou. When Big Joe breaks, she holds a memorial service for its shards, tearfully recalling, "He was always there for me when I needed him.

" And drinking wine is so linked to the women of Real Housewives shows that three of the women it made famous-Bethenny Frankel, Ramona Singer, and Teresa Giudice-introduced their own brands. In 2010, Gallup pollsters reported that nearly two-thirds of all American women drank regularly, a higher percentage than any other time in twenty-five years. Like many other studies around the world, Gallup found that drinking habits correlated directly with socioeconomic status. The more educated and well off a woman is, the more likely she is to imbibe. Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and those who identified themselves as non-Christians were also far more likely to drink than churchgoing Protestants. White women are more likely to drink than women of other racial backgrounds, but that is changing, too. An analysis of the drinking habits of eighty-five thousand Americans between the early 1990s and the early 2000s found that the percentage of women who classified themselves as regular drinkers rose across the board. The number of white women drinkers increased 24 percent; Hispanics, 33 percent; and black women, 42 percent.

(American Indian women were not included in this study. Because of the isolation of many Native American communities and the devastating role alcohol often plays in them, researchers typically study tribal alcohol use separately. Asian women were also not included; of all ethnic groups, they drink the least, perhaps because of a genetic intolerance that creates an uncomfortable flushing of the face and chest.) Women are the wine industry''s most enthusiastic customers. Despite the recession (or perhaps because of it), wine consumption in the U.S. continued to grow between the years 2009 and 2012, according to wine industry analysts. Not all that wine is being decorously sipped.

In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study that found 11 percent of American women binge drink regularly, about half the rate of men. Researchers define binge drinking as more than four drinks in two hours for women, and five drinks in two hours for men. While we are accustomed to the news of binge-drinking youths, the study revealed a surprising statistic: While more younger women binge drink, the highest frequency of binge drinking was among women ages sixty-five and older. On average, women over sixty-five overdid it six times every month, surpassing women in their twenties, who averaged four. No surprise, then, that the number of women arrested for drunk driving rose nearly 30 percent in the nine years between 1998 and 2007. In California alone, between 1994 and 2009, that number doubled, going from 10.6 percent of all drivers to 21.2 percent.

Women over forty had among the highest rates of arrest. There is evidence that alcohol dependence among women is also rising precipitously. Two large national surveys of drinking habits, conducted in 1991 and 1992, and again in 2001 and 2002, found that women born between 1954 and 1963 had an 80 percent greater chance of developing dependence on alcohol than women who were born between 1944 and 1953. For men of those generations, the rate stayed flat. The topic of women and alcohol is a relatively new one in academic research, with only a handful of experts around the country. Sharon Wilsnack, a distinguished professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences, became one of its pioneers as a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s. Though she has published hundreds of academic papers about women and alcohol, she is perhaps best known for the longitudinal studies of women''s drinking she began conducting with her husband, sociologist Richard Wilsnack, in the early 1980s. Since then, the Wilsnacks have directed and analyzed in-depth, face-to-face interviews about drinking habits with more than eleven hundred women ages twenty-one to sixty-nine.

In the most recent evaluations of the study compl.