“The truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes – the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew – that what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of “being female.”

“The truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes – the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew – that what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of “being female.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe