To be more clear, men have a tendency to become more prone to violence when they are drunk. And women have a tendency to become the targets of that violence. There's a pretty string reason, right there, for women to prefer men who do not drink.
BTW, you know why it is that people, especially women, tend to look so dour and unappealing in old photographs like this? It isn't that they were really less attractive back then.
Early photographic emulsions used on wet plates and early films were considerably less sensitive than more modern films or digital image sensors. Some of the earliest photographs required exposures on the order of hours. The first photograph to contain recognizable human figures had an exposure of about ten minutes. A man was getting his shoes shined in the scene where a cityscape photograph was being taken, which resulted in both he and the shoe shiner remaining in a consistent enough position, long enough, that their figures could be recognized as human shapes in the resulting image.
The above picture probably required an exposure of a minute or longer, at least. To get a reasonably sharp picture, they had to stay frozen in pose and facial expression for that long. Especially with women, it seems, the only facial expressions that can readily be held in place that long are unappealing expressions such as we see here. Men could sometimes pull it off, so that they came out looking regal or dignified, but women tended much more to come out looking dour and bitchy.
Modern photographs are usually taken at exposures of anywhere from 1/25 of a second (generally regarded as the slowest speed at which one can expect to hold a camera sufficiently still with a standard-length lens—modern image stabilization technology makes even slower speeds feasible in hand-held shooting; generally, with much slower speeds than this, it's assumed you'll need to put the camera on a tripod or other stable mount, rather than holding it in your hands) to 1/8000 of a second (the fastest speed on most high-end modern shutters—Nikon had one production model, the D1, with a 1//16,000 shutter, but after that, they concentrated more on reliability and accuracy than raw speed.)
