sensations or feelings with any integrity or acuity. She is overwrought not because of any objective condition in her life but because she is a woman and women get emotional and overwrought simply because that is how women are. Doctors have prescribed
tranquilizers to women for menstrual cramps, which have a physiological cause; for battery— the battered woman is handed a prescription and sent home to the batterer; for pregnancy—a woman is chem ically helped to accept an unwanted pregnancy; for many
* Testimony in 1978 by the acting director o f the National Institute on
Drug Abuse before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and
Control.
physiologically rooted diseases that the doctor does not care to investigate (but he would examine a man carefully, not give a tranquilizer); and for physiological and psychological conditions that result from stress caused by environmental, political, social, or
economic factors. When a man and a woman go to doctors complaining of the same symptoms, she is dismissed or handed a tranquilizer and he is examined and given tests.
womanhood. Freud is credited by some sentimentalists as a feminist because he insisted that men could be genuinely hysterical too.
He was the first to assert that hysteria could manifest in someone
without a womb. This was very liberal and rebellious, and Freud’s
was a lone voice. Medical opinion was that hysteria as a pathology
was exclusively limited to women because women had wombs and
because women were obviously hysterical. Despite Freud’s apostasy and its subsequent acceptance in psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is still associated with the female. She does not have reason or intellect; she has emotion. She starts with a lot of emotion by virtue of being female; when she gets more emotion than is socially acceptable, or when emotion begins to interfere with the exercise
of her female functions or the performance of her female duties,
then she is sedated or tranquilized. Female complaints to male doctors are perceived as emotional excrescences; and indeed, women learn as girls that either they convince through emotional display
or they do not convince at all, so that women do tend to persuade
by force of feeling and do learn early to compensate for the almost
certain knowledge that they will not be believed because they are
not credible no matter how accurate, restrained, or logical they are.
The solution to female emotional excess, whether expressed by the
woman—appropriately by her lights—or hallucinated by the male
doctor, is keeping women calm or numb or asleep with drugs. The
dulling of the female mind is neither feared nor noticed; nor is the
loss of vitality or independence. The female is valued for how she
looks—sometimes droopy eyelids are quite in fashion—and for do
mestic, sex, and reproductive work, none of which requires that
she be alert. She is given drugs because nothing is lost when she is
drugged, except what is regarded as the too thick edge of her emotional life. She is given drugs because she is not much valued; she takes the drugs because she is not much valued; she stays on the
drugs because she is not much valued; the doctors keep prescribing
the drugs because she is not much valued; the effects of addiction
or dependency on her are not much noted because she is not much
valued. These are prescription drugs, regarded as appropriate medications for women. The junkie, for the most part, is left to the violent life of the streets; the woman addicted to prescribed drugs
has already been tamed and is kept tamed by the drugs. The drugs
are prescribed to these huge numbers of women each and every
year because their usage not only supports but significantly upholds social policy with respect to women: their effects reinforce women in traditional female roles, postures, and passivity; they
dull women’s perceptions of and responses to an environment and
predetermined social status that are demeaning, aggravating, and
enraging; they quiet women down. The use of these drugs to
numb these masses of women shows only how little women are
worth— to the doctors who do the prescribing, to the women
