Emmeline Clein at The Nation:
A woman gnaws at her nails: one hand in her mouth, the other clutching the shaft of a mop, which serves as one bar of a prison cell composed of cleaning products. It’s an apt metaphor. In mid-century America, housewives were expected to polish their own gilded cages without considering how their feelings of entrapment might be related to their imprisonment in suburban homes. But by the late 1960s, even advertisers recognized that women might find such lives a little upsetting after reading The Feminine Mystique.
The aforementioned woman is a model in a 1967 ad for a tranquilizer called Miltown. The ad acknowledged that the drug “cannot change her environment…but it can help relieve the anxiety” caused by her conditions. Ten years prior, Miltown had swept the market, selling over a billion units in the decade after Wallace Laboratories debuted it. In ads for Miltown, pharmaceutical copy suggested an incompatibility between liberatory social movements and surviving the suburbs might be to blame for a woman’s anxious distress. Nonetheless, they had a solution: A pill would go down more smoothly than a revolution.
P.E. Moskowitz deftly deconstructs this ad in a scathing examination of today’s psychopharmaceutical industrial complex in their third and newest book, Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs.
more here.
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