"The Somatic Mask and Nervous Housewife: Marketing Valium in the United States"

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

In retrospect Valium is remembered as an anti-anxiety drug over-prescribed to women for temporary but normal stresses of living. Compared to tranquilizers of the 1950s, Valium ads in the 1960s tried to highlight the drug as a treatment for nervous, psychosomatic, and somatic disorders. The “Somatic Mask” campaign was an effort to present Valium as a safe and scientifically proven compound useful for widespread conditions associated with tension, stress, and anxiety. Strangely, more gendered advertising appears in the 1970s, when the role of gender socialization in the creation and labeling of mental illness is more contentious.

Cai Guise-Richardson is about to defend her dissertation at Iowa State University. Although her interests range from vulcanization and early rubber industry, to chrome tanning and its relation to footwear design, to developments in Gilded Age microbiology, her dissertation focuses on how Valium was developed, discovered, and tested in the context of late-1940s and 1950s medical theory. She is now in the process of adapting the dissertation into a book, tentatively entitled Emotional Aspirin.