Recent data show that women are more likely to drink alcohol to cope with stress, compared to men. We hypothesized that changes in circuit function in the basolateral (BLA) and central amygdala (CeA) of females could prime for this sex-specific effect of stress on ethanol drinking. To test this, we first developed a behavioral model that captures sex differences in stress-induced ethanol drinking. After training male and female C57BL/6J mice in a drinking-in-the-dark paradigm, we show that female mice drink more ethanol following repeated exposure to a foot shock stressor, compared to male mice. We then tested whether this female-specific increase involved changes in amygdalar circuits, in particular cholinergic, GABA and principal neurons (PN). We found that female mice, but not male mice, reduced their ethanol intake when BLA cholinergic terminals were inhibited chemogenetically in the absence of stress. However, inhibition of cholinergic terminals prior to stress did not change ethanol drinking, suggesting that other non-BLA mechanisms may drive this stress-induced effect in females. Since the excitatory/inhibitory balance in the amygdala is known to fine tune stress responses, with the use of dual-color fiber photometry we tracked GABA and PN activity in the CeA of female mice drinking ethanol before and after stress in our behavioral paradigm. We found that in the CeA of female mice, the activity of GABA neurons relative to that of PN during ethanol drinking bouts was lower after repeated stress exposure, suggesting that hyperactivity of the CeA may drive stress-induced ethanol drinking in females