Women As Property

Did you know that husbands routinely had their wives committed to insane asylums when they were done with them and often when that wife entered menopause? While this meme dates this happening in the 19th century, it carried over through the 1950s. Long term psychiatric facilities, dotted across the USA, were filled with these women, discards from their husbands’ lives, often so their ‘hubbies’ could find someone younger; a younger woman who would make them feel young again until they were old enough to need a nurse. She provided that service, too. And that’s the truth this former psychiatric RN practitioner learned in her undergraduate Public Health history classes.

And in the 1960s, women of a certain age were prescribed ‘mothers little helper’ pills a.k.a. Valium, to keep them mellow during menopause so that their husbands could tolerate them. I believe Mick Jagger’s “Mother’s Little Helper’ was inspired by these times. He must have known a few.

Women were property of men, just as enslaved people were, and some descendants of those property owning men want women to return to that statehood.