You Go to My Head: Women's Prescription Pill Use in Postwar America
Abstract
During the postwar era, US pharmaceutical companies grew their production and distribution of prescription pills, which included barbiturates, minor tranquilizers, and amphetamines for mass consumption. Middle- and upper-class women were the majority users of these pills, finding assistance with the aid of prescribed drugs that helped correct difficulty with sleeping, eased anxiety, provided energy, and reduced the users’ size. This dissertation works to bring drug history and women’s history together to integrate the impact prescription pills had on women’s lives, positive and negative, and how and why consumers sought these drugs and the effects they promised. This project uncovers interactions between women, prescription pills, and feminism from the 1950s through 1970s in both explicit and subtle ways. The Second-Wave Women’s Movement expanded over the years of women’s heightened pill use, and feminism notably addressed these drugs as they were an integral part of millions of women’s lives. For many, pill use was a sign that women were unhappy with traditional roles and needed society to change. Pills aided women in achieving gender expectations, which feminists would critique as problems with a patriarchal society and gender roles. Women noticed the way they encountered problems and wanted to solve them. Pills were a tool society heralded as a suitable fix and physicians easily supplied them, noting that women benefited from this assistance. Based on personal accounts, prescription pills were not just the oppressive tools that media narratives often imply, leaving women lethargic and indifferent to their lives. The rise of women’s pill use reveals that gender roles were unmanageable, both in traditional standards and new forms as expectations shifted. Prescription pills provided aid to deal with what felt like personal issues and frustrations that feminists later pointed out as larger systemic problems, reflecting a breaking point in many women’s acceptance of gender roles and norms. The relationship between pill use and women was complex. Prescription pills helped some fill traditional norms and others to become more progressive. They raised the standards and possibilities in both cases and brought both needed aid and unintentional harm.