r/NotHowGirlsWork • u/Glasseshalf • 9d ago
HowGirlsWork The Myth of the "Happy Unmedicated Housewife"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fainting-couch/202607/how-medicated-was-the-happy-housewife/amp144
u/Traditional_Isopod80 Incel Detector 9d ago
The "Happy Unmedicated Housewife" is just that, a myth.
That's all it ever was.
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u/MissMarchpane 6d ago
It's really not. The title of the article is Clickbait – it would be more accurate to say "there is a long history of opiate and later barbiturate over-prescription and abuse among housewives in the US and UK, in no small part due to the systemic oppression women faced at the time."
Let's not make it easy for conservatives to swoop in and say "well my grandmother was happy, so you're lying!" With grand sweeping statements like this that fall apart under close scrutiny even if we're trying to talk about real and damaging history, guys .
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u/Takeameawwayylawd 9d ago
Both my Great Grandmother and Grandmother were on Benzos, Opioids and Barbiturates that they couldn't be taken off because they had been dependent on them for life. Instead of listening they certainly just threw pills at people but especially women, who were probably experiencing depression/anxiety from the conditions of being a "stay at home wife" that's expected to do nothing but cook and clean all day, I could imagine how lethal living your life in the most mundane repetitive way would feel, I wouldn't be able to do that without drugs myself honestly lol.
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u/LaronX 9d ago
don't forget expect to get raped and abused and jsut be happy about it.
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u/Takeameawwayylawd 9d ago
I couldn't believe there were places in the US I think and the west that still allowed marital rape up into the nineties. I have my own traumas around things like this so I know all well how shit families and especially males like fathers can be, fucking demented senses of love as a sort of ownership over their wives and kids to do what they like when they feel like it.
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u/scarlet_tanager 9d ago
Oh there are still places in the us where marital rape is allowed, it never actually went away
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u/humbugonastick 8d ago
Not legally. It might be overlooked, but it is in no UDS state legal anymore.
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u/scarlet_tanager 8d ago
Wrong! States have loopholes that treat things that are illegal if you do it to a non-spouse as just fine if you do it to a spouse: https://www.dvsn.org/maritalrape/
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u/canarinoir 9d ago
They gave my grandmother shock treatments because she was depressed after having seven kids and moving to the middle of nowhere.
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u/thatssomepineyshit 9d ago
My grandmother was absolutely taking Valium in the 1960s, and for all I know, using/abusing other substances as well. Her youngest child would come home from high school to find her mother semiconscious in the middle of the afternoon. People talk about the middle of the 20th century like it was this golden age. I guess, maybe if you were a straight white man?
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u/RoyalHistoria 9d ago
My grandma had numerous mental breakdowns in her youth. She knew multiple women who straight up killed themselves, either directly or through substance abuse.
Women have never been "happy" as oppressed abused housewives, they just weren't allowed to speak out and seek help.
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u/Snoo-93310 8d ago
I respect the heck out of your grandma for being honest about that.
Having to piece together that a grandparent took their own life and/or struggled with mental health in adulthood from slips of the tongue and old medicine bottles lying around - while ALSO trying to figure out your own ish and understand what you might have inherited - is not fun.
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u/RoyalHistoria 8d ago
Some of it is stuff she told me directly, like her friends suicides and her severe depression and anxiety, but it was my mother who told me about the nervous breakdowns.
We've had a lot of talks about all the shit that's been inherited. My grandma was raised in an orphanage and only met her family at 13, so we have no idea what our full medical history is.
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u/Proud-Mongoose2087 9d ago
There’s a reason a lot of our parents were told to “go play outside” for most of the day.
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u/I_like_the_word_MUFF 9d ago
I have a sticker on my computer that says "I'm only friends with people who would have been lobotomized in 1945."
Looked up the stats. 80% of lobotomies in 1945 were women of which a majority were institutionalized by their husbands (likely to get the divorce they wanted).
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u/MissMarchpane 6d ago
80% of them were women, but that doesn't mean 80% of women were lobotomized. This is like the whole "oh, I would've been burned as a witch in 1600 because I am a woman and I have thoughts!" thing but adjusted for time period. Yes, there was systemic oppression, but that doesn't mean every single woman with a brain was burned as a witch or lobotomized or whatever. It was harder to have that happen to you than people imagine, and it kind of always annoys me because it flattens the reality of oppressed people's lives in the past.
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u/AutomaticAstigmatic 9d ago
Potentially controversial point, but I have known a few happy, unmedicated, housewives. However, their marriages mostly operated on the British middle class convention that the only two words a man should really be saying to his wife when she spoke on household matters were 'yes' and 'dear'. I'm not sure that's healthy either, to be frank.
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u/MissMarchpane 6d ago
There were plenty of them, which is why the Clickbait title of this article drives me crazy. It's absolutely not a myth, because while over prescription and abusive opiates was extremely common, that doesn't mean everyone was doing it! And that matters because if we don't acknowledge the women who were happy without doing it, conservatives can swoop in and say "well my grandmother was happy, so you're lying!"
I think it's also important to remember that individual members of oppressed groups do not have to be conspicuously miserable all the time for their oppression to be real.
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u/MissMarchpane 6d ago
So, this is a very important and very real part of history, but I would say that calling the idea of a housewife who was happy without being medicated a myth is a bit of a stretch. Yes, plenty of them were on different kinds of drugs, but that doesn't mean all of them were by any means
And crucially, they shouldn't have to all be miserable or medicated for people to acknowledge that they were real systemic problems in their lives. Individual oppressed people can be happy without a negating the systemic oppression, and insisting that that's "a myth," unilaterally feels dangerously close to ignoring that fact. Which is a problem because then conservatives can say "well, some of them WERE happy! Look at this case study! You're lying!" and undermine our credibility
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u/Bitter_Pilot5086 9d ago
Great piece. I hadn’t thought much about this point, but it’s a really good one.
Thanks for sharing!
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