This book has taken as its starting point the popular twentieth-century image of the ‘desperate housewife’. It has traced the origins of an association between minor mental illness and domesticity and has suggested that, since the 1970s, ideas about this association have been dominated by theories formulated by feminist academics. However, the testimonies provided by the women interviewed for this project in fact suggest that, while not always easy, domestic life provided many married women with a role that they valued and, in many cases, enjoyed. It is of course possible that post-war social commentators, politicians and religious leaders saw it as politically expedient to construct the breadwinner model of the family as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’, and to return women to their ‘place’ in the home. Neither is it assumed here that there is universally something ‘proper’ or ‘desirable’ about the traditional family unit. It is nevertheless argued here that middle-class housewives did not uniformly evaluate their living arrangements as oppressive. Feminist accounts have sought to exclude the possibility that some women wanted to remain at home. As Katie Roiphe has noted, feminists are in danger of creating ‘their own rigid orthodoxy’ – the movement that once promised women a voice is now being used to tell them what they ought to say and think.

The previous chapters have illustrated how, during the 1950s and 1960s, as notions of mental illness expanded to include less serious symptoms, minor mental illness was in fact constructed in a number of different ways.