maintained in appalling conditions— kept alive but barely. If this is
true, the social function of nursing homes becomes clearer: out of
sight, out of mind. Blacks are already invisible in ghettos— young,
middle-aged, old. Black women have been socially segregated and
marginalized all their lives. Perceptions of their suffering are easily
avoided by an already callous white-supremacist populace, the so-
called mainstream. It is white women who have become poor and
extraneous with old age; they are taken from mainstream communities where they are useless and dumped in nursing homes. It is important to keep them away from those eager, young, middle-class white women who might be demoralized at what is in store
for them once they cease to be useful. Kept in institutions until
they die as a punishment for having lived so long, for having outlived their sex-appropriate work, old white women find themselves drugged (6 . 1 prescriptions for an average patient, more than half
the patients given drugs like Thorazine and Mellaril); sick from
neglect with bedsores, urinary, eye, and ear infections; left lying in
their own filth, tied into so-called geriatric chairs or tied into bed;
sometimes not fed, not given heat, not given any nursing care;
sometimes left in burning baths (from which there have been
drownings); sometimes beaten and left with broken bones. Even in
old age, a woman had better have a man to protect her. She has
earned no place in society on her own. With a man, she will most
likely not end up in a prison for the female old. She has more social
value if she has a man, no matter how old she is—and she will also
have more money. After a lifetime of systematic economic discrimination—no pay for housekeeping, lower pay for salaried work, lower Social Security benefits, often with no rights to her husband’s pension or other benefits even after decades of marriage if he has left her—a woman alone is virtually resourceless. The euphemistically named “displaced homemaker” foreshadows the old woman who is put away.
The drugging of the predominantly female nursing home population continues in old age a pattern established with awful frequency among women: women get 60 to 80 percent of the prescriptions for mood-altering drugs (60 percent of the prescriptions for barbiturates, 67 percent for tranquilizers, and 80 percent for
amphetamines). Women are prescribed more than twice the drugs
that men are for the same psychological conditions. One study of
women in Utah, cited by Muriel Nellis in
that 69 percent of women over the age of thirty-four who were not
employed outside the home and who were members in good standing of the Mormon Church use minor tranquilizers. ”6 Such women are considered a high-risk group for addiction by the time
they are forty-five or fifty.
The dimensions of female drug addiction and dependency are
staggering. In 1977, 36 million women used tranquilizers; 16 million, sleeping pills; 12 million, amphetamines; and nearly 12 mil
lion women got prescriptions for these drugs from doctors for the
first time. As N ellis, who cites these figures, * makes clear:
Those numbers do not include whole classes of prescribed pain
killers, all of which are mood altering and addictive. Nor do
they include the billions of doses dispensed to patients directly, without a prescription, in doctors’ offices, in m ilitary, public, or private hospitals, and in clinics or nursing homes. 7
According to the Food and Drug Administration, between 1977
and 1980 Valium was the most prescribed drug in the United
States.
At best it can be said that the woman’s lot in life, the female
role, necessitates a lot of medical intervention in the form of mood-
altering drugs. At worst it must be said that these drugs are prescribed to women because they are women— and because the doctors are largely men. The male doctor’s perception of the
female patient, conditioned by his belief in his own difference from
her and superiority to her, is that she is very emotional, very upset, irrational, has no sense of proportion, cannot discern what is trivial and what is important. She has no credibility as an observer
of her own condition or even as one who can report subjective
