also, while 50k lobotomy patients is a lot, it’s less than 0.03% of the combined population of the us and canada in 1952

I think it's a tricky thing to talk about.

Because women were disproportionately targeted for lobotomies- women, children, and disabled people. My own mother narrowly avoided being lobotomized for her epilepsy in the late '50s, because my grandparents' friends advised them to avoid taking her to a fashionable neurosurgeon who'd set up practice in their city.

(Upon researching a bit, I think there's a chance it may have been the doctor who destroyed Rosemary Kennedy's brain. Chilling either way, since Mom went on to patent inventions, help dozens of disabled kids as a special ed teacher, sustain a 40+ year marriage and counting, have three children of her own, travel the world, act, write, create, dream, adventure...and all of that could have been thwarted by some butcher when she was 6 years old. For many of those 50K people, it was. And that's not nothing.)

But. It's a fallacy to say "all housewives in the 1950s were lobotomized or drugged to keep them complacent, and none were content with their lives otherwise." And a dangerous one, I think. Because it can lead to people thinking that if an oppressed person IS happy, well, they must not be oppressed!

Also, on a micro level, I feel like we owe these people the reality of their lives. We owe the women of the 1950s, each individual one, an accurate representation of her experience when we talk about it. I know some of them found happiness. I'm glad they did. Life was hard enough for women as a group- I don't want to erase what joy they did manage to wring out of their circumstances.