Psychology Today | 29.07.2026 01:12
The modern, liberated Anglo-American woman is “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” and we would do well as a country to reinstate the “old standard of public men and private women” (Yenor). Scott Yenor’s 2021 claim implies that the woman who kept to the private, domestic sphere (for whom he is nostalgic) was, in part, unmedicated or at least less medicated than the unhappy, friendless, independent woman of today. The 1850s and 1950s—periods of the sacrosanct “Angel in the House” and the “Happy Housewife,” respectively—can stand as two temporal test cases for this nostalgia: Were these celebrated housewives unmedicated or minimally medicated? In this post, I focus on the Victorian period, asking: Did domestic duty correlate with a lack of chemical “management”?
