ushered in by missioneries, mass media and travel

08:33 Aug 17, 2009 

Jim is correct about the spelling of missionaries. Thank you Jim!For a long list of contradictions in American Puritanism, I offer this excerpt from the book More Equal Than Others:
America from Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson: "
AT THE BEGINNING of the twenty-first century, the United States was a mature civilization marked by striking, well-rooted contradictions. It is (and the list of pairs by no means exhausts the difficulties facing anyone who attempts a simplistic analysis) generally pacific but occasionally bellicose; religious yet secular; innovative but conservative; tough but tender; aggressive yet reluctant to incur casualties; egalitarian by instinct but stratified in tiers of wide and growing inequality; puritan yet selfindulgent; conformist but full of independent-minded people; devoted to justice, yet in many ways remarkably unfair; idealistic yet given to cynicism. ("Nice guys finish last" is almost a national motto.) At some times it can be self-confident to the verge of complacency, at others self-doubting to the point of neurosis."

08:29 Aug 17, 2009 

The text fragment you provide is short, with little background on the reference to coffee and alcohol, but I understand it as a commentary that both men and women participated equally in a social environment where coffee was drunk, but they were more excluded in a social environment of bars and taverns where alcohol was the beverage of choice.

08:20 Aug 17, 2009 

I think "both" refers to :1-continued patriarchal values 2-hegemonic paradoxes of American Puritanism..