Victorian Housewives Weren’t Naturally Serene, They Were on Some Pretty Wild Drugs
· Vice
Picture the ideal Victorian housewife — serene, compliant, presiding over her household with grace and very little complaint. Now picture what was in her medicine cabinet. Bromides. Chloral hydrate. Tully’s powder, which was morphine mixed with camphor. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which was advertised as an herbal remedy for “female complaints” and was around 40 proof. The serenity had some chemical assistance.
Victorian doctors prescribed opiates to middle-class women as a matter of routine — for menstrual pain, for nerves, for the loosely defined condition known as “the vapours,” which covered everything from anxiety to general unhappiness with one’s circumstances. A paper from 1859 by Charles Meigs, whose text on women’s diseases was one of the most widely used in American medicine, recommended opium for menstrual pain as a standard course of treatment. An 1851 medical journal, cited by Psychology Today, reproduced a London physician’s advice that doctors had been “too timid” in their use of sedatives, and particularly opium, for women going through menopause.
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American physicians, to their credit, took the hint immediately. By 1900, nearly two-thirds of people addicted to opium in the United States were women, according to historian David Courtwright’s research—and that figure comes specifically from the middle- and upper-class white population. The demographic, in other words, that the era held up as its domestic ideal.
Victorian Housewives Were Being Kept Calm With Opiates and Alcohol
The patent medicine industry ran a parallel operation. Products marketed specifically to women under names like “women’s friends” lined drugstore counters and were sold on trade cards featuring wholesome domestic imagery. McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, nationally marketed from 1841, was advertised as having been “entirely robbed of its narcotic property.” It hadn’t been. In 1864, a professor at New York Medical College exposed the scam: what McMunn had actually removed was narcotine, a compound with no narcotic effect whatsoever. The morphine, the actually addictive part, was still very much in there. Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription for Women claimed to contain no alcohol and listed a respectable assortment of herbal ingredients. Before 1890, it was mostly alcohol and opium tincture.
The products were a con, but the marketing was almost impressively coherent. As researcher Joseph Crawford has observed, while male writers like Coleridge and De Quincey consumed opiates for creative stimulation, women were taking them to get through the day — to manage anxiety, insomnia, and what Crawford describes as the “drudgery and hardships of everyday life.” The same drugs, completely different context. Sold back to them wrapped in the language of feminine domestic virtue.
A character in Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke describes the scene at a drugstore on market day, women stopping in for their “pennord o’ elevation, to last her out the week,” and offers a summary that hasn’t aged very well: “Well, it keeps women-folk quiet, it do.”
The historical record on the Victorian housewife is pretty clear. She wasn’t calm because domestic life was fulfilling. She was calm because her doctor, her pharmacist, and an entire consumer industry had a vested interest in keeping her that way.
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