Women and Stress: 70 years of Saying I'm Fine
Updated: Oct 5
From “housewife’s nerves” to burnout, the language has changed. Mental health care has changed too. But the expectations women carry, and our willingness to admit when those expectations have become too much, have been harder to leave behind.
Last year, I shared a series on Instagram about women, stress and mental wellness through the decades. It started with the 1950s and 60s, those beautifully polished images of women with perfectly coiffed hair, dinner on the table and lives that could look wonderfully uncomplicated from the outside. Then we moved into the 70s and 80s, when women gained more choices, more independence and more opportunities, while somehow continuing to carry many of the expectations that had been handed down before them. I thought it would be an interesting series. I didn’t expect to still be thinking about it a year later.
You see? For me, I learned something early about what doesn’t get said. Not because anyone sat me down and explained the rules. Because I watched. I watched the women in front of me handle things, hard things and quiet things and things that had no name, and keep moving. I watched them smile when they were tired, hold it together when the holding was costly, and answer a certain way when someone asked how they were doing.
I learned the answer before I understood the question.
Fine.
I became very good at fine. Good enough that I carried it through a tumultuous start in life, through building a business, through a new marriage, through the travel and the accounts and the professional wins and the smiling and the being all the things. Good enough that I swung from one impossible thing to another and called it ambition. Good enough that my body eventually made the decision my mouth wouldn’t.
I woke up on the side of a road.
Saw double. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t remember where I was. A week in the hospital because my body had finally, absolutely, completely rejected the stress it had been absorbing for years and decided to stop in a way I couldn’t override or explain away or push through. And when I got out, I was of course, fine. That was over. Back to the business. Back to the smiling. The IBS got worse. The sleep got harder. The quiet anxiety amplified. The frustration I had been managing so carefully started showing at the edges. But I was fine. I had always been fine. Fine was the only thing I knew how to be.
I have spent a long time understanding how I got there. And the more I have understood, the more I have realized that I did not learn fine in a vacuum. I learned it from watching women who learned it the same way.
The Photograph Cannot Tell Us Everything
There is something about old photographs of women that makes me wonder about everything the picture cannot show.
The hair is done. The lipstick is on. The children are lined up and somebody has probably made sure the living room was presentable before the camera came out. The photograph captures the occasion and the smile, but it cannot tell us whether she slept the night before. It cannot tell us whether the household money stretched as far as it needed to, or how it felt to be responsible for running a home when she had very little control over the money coming into it. It cannot tell us whether her marriage was happy, whether her stomach hurt, whether she was lonely, or whether she had spent part of that afternoon wondering why she simply didn’t feel like herself.
I think about my mother. Up at 5am on Thanksgiving morning to make sure dinner was on the table at noon. Sitting down to eat in a dress and apron with her lipstick on. She loved that day. I believe that completely. She also carried an enormous amount that the photograph couldn’t show, and she carried it the way women in her generation learned to carry things, without calling it a burden, without calling it stress, without calling it much of anything except what needed to be done.
She was fine.
And her table was perfectly set. Generations of women carried an enormous amount without a name for what they were carrying. There was always something that needed doing, someone who needed tending, and a clear understanding that a capable woman handled what was in front of her. She might be tired. She might have nerves. She might be going through a difficult spell. But if someone asked how she was doing, there was an answer women had become very good at giving.
We did not just inherit recipes, holiday traditions and family stories from the women before us. We inherited ideas about what women were supposed to be able to handle.
What most of us don’t know is what happened when they couldn’t handle it. What they were told. How they were treated. What the medical establishment did with their suffering when it became impossible to contain.
That history belongs to us too. Even if no one ever told us about it.
What Women Were Told When Fine Wasn’t Working
For much of the 1950s and 1960s, when a woman sat in a doctor’s office and tried to describe what she was feeling, the nervousness, the exhaustion, the sadness, the stomach trouble, the sleep that wouldn’t come, what she was experiencing was understood primarily as anxiety or nerves, a problem located inside the woman rather than something worth examining in the context of her life.
Medicine was changing quickly. Miltown arrived in the 1950s, followed by Librium and then Valium, and tranquilizers became part of ordinary American life at an astonishing pace. By the late 1960s, roughly one in five American women reported using a minor tranquilizer in a given year, compared with fewer than one in ten men.
I want to be careful here. Medication can provide real relief, and I am not interested in telling anyone what they should or shouldn’t take. What I am interested in is the question sitting underneath the prescription: when a woman was struggling, were we listening closely enough to what was making her life hard, or were we sometimes helping her become better able to tolerate it?
The culture she was living in had very definite ideas about what a woman should be able to handle. She was expected to be calm, capable, maternal, cooperative and grateful. When she was anxious or unhappy, it was possible to look very closely at the woman without looking quite as closely at the life surrounding her. A woman could be responsible for making the household budget work without having meaningful financial independence of her own. It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was enacted in 1974 that federal law prohibited creditors from discriminating against applicants on the basis of sex or marital status. Before that, a married woman could need her husband’s signature to open a credit card in her own name. The money she managed every day was often not legally hers to borrow against.
These were not small things. And yet when she showed up at the doctor’s office tired and anxious and not quite herself, the conversation was rarely about those things.
Motherhood made that silence even more complicated.
A baby was supposed to bring joy. And for many women it absolutely did. But what happened when a woman loved that baby completely and also felt frightened, deeply sad, anxious, or completely unlike herself? What happened when the exhaustion went beyond tired and the feelings went beyond what anyone around her seemed to think was appropriate for a woman holding a healthy child in a home with food on the table?
The language we have now, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, the baby blues, didn’t exist in the clear distinct way it does today. What some women experienced after birth was sometimes dismissed as nerves, as hormones settling, as a failure to adjust. A woman whose symptoms were considered more severe might be hospitalized or treated with interventions that had more to do with managing her than understanding her. And even in less extreme circumstances, the pressure surrounding new motherhood was its own form of silencing. She was supposed to be grateful, present, patient, loving, and visibly not struggling, all while recovering from birth, functioning on inadequate sleep, and trying to understand who she was in this new version of her life.
If she said she didn’t feel right, she might hear that every new mother was exhausted. That it was probably her hormones. That she just needed to give herself time. She learned, in that moment, the same lesson women learned everywhere else. What you feel is less important than how you appear. What you’re experiencing is less important than whether you’re managing it. And if you love your baby and your life contains good things, admitting that you’re struggling means something is wrong with you.
That shame has been one of the most durable parts of the inheritance. The new mother who couldn’t say she wasn’t fine. The midlife woman who couldn’t say she wasn’t fine. The grandmother who never said it at all. Different life stages. The same silence. The same learned understanding that certain things don’t get said. Because what will people think.
In the most extreme cases, the psychiatric treatments women received were devastating. A survey of U.S. psychiatric facilities from 1949 to 1951 found that most patients who underwent lobotomy were women, at a time when ideas about appropriate female behavior were deeply entangled with ideas about mental illness. A woman who didn’t fit the expected shape of calm and cooperative could find herself on the receiving end of interventions that had nothing to do with helping her and everything to do with making her easier to manage.
Our grandmothers lived inside that history. Some of them directly like my own grandmother. Some of them adjacent to it, watching what happened to women who spoke too loudly or cried too much or couldn’t stop being sad. They learned, as women have always learned, by watching what was safe and what wasn’t.
They didn’t teach us to say fine. They showed us what happened when you didn’t.
The Inheritance Nobody Named
By the time avocado-green kitchens gave way to shoulder pads and power suits, women had opportunities their mothers and grandmothers had fought hard to make possible. And the problem was that many of the old expectations didn’t politely leave when the new opportunities arrived. They piled on top.
The woman of the 1980s could build a career and still be the person who knew when the family was running out of toothpaste. She could earn her own income and still be the one who remembered the child needed poster board for school tomorrow. She could raise children, maintain a marriage, create the holidays, stay connected to friends, keep advancing professionally, and somehow also meet a beauty standard that had become louder, not quieter, with the rise of exercise culture and diet messaging and the relentless visual ideal of a woman who was doing everything and visibly not struggling with any of it.
Having it all sounded liberating. In practice it was often just a different configuration of the same expectation: handle it. Handle all of it. Handle it well. And when someone asks how you’re doing, you know the answer. Fine.
I know this one from the inside.
I came from a start that taught me early about what we don’t talk about. What will people think was not a casual question in the world I grew up in. It was a filter, a constant quiet reckoning between what was true and what was sayable, and I carried that filter into every version of my adult life. Into the business. Into the marriage. Into the travel and the accounts and the professional wins and the smile that stayed on regardless of what was happening underneath it.
I was performing fine long before I realized fine was a performance.
The panic attack on the side of the road wasn’t a surprise in retrospect. My body had been sending signals for a long time. The IBS that made leaving the house a calculation. The sleep that wasn’t restorative. The irritability that showed at the edges. The anxiety that had become so familiar it felt like personality. I had been managing the signals rather than reading them, because reading them would have required admitting that fine wasn’t working. And I didn’t know how to do that. Not yet.
The lesson of my childhood and my grandmother’s generation and my mother’s generation was the same lesson, arrived at through completely different circumstances. You carry it. You don’t name it. You keep moving. Nobody sat me down and taught me that. I absorbed it the way daughters absorb everything, in the watching, in the modeling, in the quiet education of observing what the women before you expected of themselves and accepted from the world around them.
A daughter doesn’t learn what a capable woman carries. She watches it. And then she becomes it.
Women and Stress in 2026: More Words. The Same Weight.
It would make for a satisfying ending if we could arrive in 2026 and say all of this has been resolved.
It hasn’t. Women and stress have a complicated relationship with progress. Mental health treatment is dramatically more sophisticated than what our grandmothers experienced. Therapy has become far less stigmatized. We talk openly about postpartum depression, anxiety, trauma, perimenopause, burnout, boundaries. The language has expanded enormously and that matters. Having words for what you’re experiencing changes something important about your ability to ask for help.
And women can still leave a medical appointment feeling as though nobody quite understood what they were trying to say. The blood work comes back within range. The symptoms are common for her age. She still isn’t sleeping. The exhaustion hasn’t lifted. Her mood is different, her digestion has changed, her hair doesn’t feel like her hair. Her skin looks dull and tired. Each individual symptom gets addressed as its own isolated problem while she wonders why no one is asking whether they might be connected.
Because she doesn’t experience her life in specialties.
Her sleep doesn’t live in one body while her digestion lives in another. Her nervous system doesn’t clock out the moment the stressful meeting ends. Her gut and her brain are in constant two-way communication, and the stress response running through all of it doesn’t separate neatly into departments that can be addressed one at a time without looking at the whole.
Common and insignificant are not the same thing. A symptom can be experienced by millions of women and still deserve curiosity about what’s driving it. Research on medical invalidation has documented what happens when people repeatedly feel their symptoms have been minimized. Some begin downplaying their own suffering, pushing past their capacity, delaying care they genuinely need. In other words, they learn to say fine.
Even now. With all the language we have. With everything that has changed. Because the inheritance is older than the language. And it runs deeper.
What the Stress Less Era Is Actually About
The burnout that came after the hospital stay eventually led me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. But not right away.
I came out of the hospital saying fine and meant it, the way you mean it when you have decided that what just happened is now behind you and the only direction available is forward. There was more ahead. A personal legal battle I carried privately for years. A betrayal that cost more than I have ever fully said out loud. And then, in what felt like the universe’s timing at its most particular, sixteen months caring for a stepfather who had not been kind to me, or to my mother, or to our family.
I said fine through all of it. Not performing exactly. More like sustaining. Keeping the operating system running while the deeper systems quietly depleted. By the time I found Amare, four years ago, I wasn’t burned out in the way people mean when they say they need a vacation. I was a shell of the woman I had been. The thing I had been calling fine for so long had cost me something I didn’t know how to name yet.
What I found wasn’t just a product. It was a framework for understanding what had been happening in my body for years while I was busy being fine. The gut-brain connection. The way stress shows up not just when life is obviously hard but continuously and quietly, when you have trained yourself not to feel it. The signals that escalate until something stops you, and what it means when you have been stopping yourself for so long that you can’t tell the difference between carrying and collapsing.
I had been living with a story about stress that was too small. And I had been living it for a very long time.
The Stress Less Era is what I built from understanding that the signals were there long before the crash. The exhaustion I normalized. The digestion I managed around. The sleep I kept trying to fix. The mood that was off in ways I couldn’t quite name. The hair that had changed. These weren’t separate problems. They were a body trying, in every language it had, to get my attention.
I wasn’t losing it -- wasn't falling apart before my own eyes. I was signaling. And I had spent so long learning not to say that out loud that I had also learned not to hear it.
Fine is not the goal. Feeling like yourself again is worth paying attention to.
That is what I want for the woman reading this. Not a prescription. Not a protocol. Not another standard to hold herself against.
I want her to become curious about herself. To notice that she hasn’t been sleeping well for weeks instead of congratulating herself for functioning anyway. To recognize that she’s become unusually irritable rather than shame herself for not being more patient. To say that her digestion has changed, her energy has disappeared, her body doesn’t feel like hers anymore, and to believe that those observations deserve attention.
I want her to stop waiting until she has enough evidence to prove she is not fine.
Maybe This Is Where We Change the Inheritance
I keep coming back to those old photographs.
My grandmother’s generation didn’t have the language we have. My mother’s generation lived through enormous changes in how women talked about themselves and their emotional lives. My generation has watched mental health move from something whispered about to something discussed openly. We have more language than any generation of women before us.
And fine has been remarkably durable.
Because fine isn’t only a word. It’s a learned response to a world that for generations gave women very little room to be anything else. It was a survival strategy, for our grandmothers who faced real consequences for being too emotional or too difficult or too much, for our mothers who watched what happened to women who pushed back, and for us, who absorbed the lesson without knowing we were learning it.
We are not going to eliminate stress. Life will still bring everything it brings, the marriages and the careers and the aging parents and the changing bodies and the grief and the joy and the days that are simply too much. What we can change is the belief that a strong woman becomes so accustomed to carrying all of it that she stops recognizing its weight.
Our grandmothers deserved to be heard.
Our mothers deserved to be understood.
So do we.
And if a woman were sitting across from me right now, telling me she has a good life, that other people have bigger problems, that she really shouldn’t complain, that she’s probably fine, I would tell her the thing I wish the women before us had heard sooner.
You do not have to wait until you are falling apart before what you are feeling counts.
Fine is not the goal. Feeling like yourself again is worth paying attention to. And the signals your body has been sending, the ones you’ve been managing around and pushing through and explaining away, they were never nothing.
They were always trying to tell you something.
Nelea R. Lane
The Happy Juice Chick | Founder, The Stress Less Era
Independent Brand Partner with Amare Global #137603
936-209-7222 — yes, you can text me.
Wondering what stress may be signaling in your own body? The Stress Signal Assessment helps you identify what has been loudest for you and where to start. Two minutes. Free. No diagnosing. Just clarity.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice.
Sources & Further Reading
Allan V. Horwitz, How an Age of Anxiety Became an Age of Depression, The Milbank Quarterly. Read the research
U.S. National Library of Medicine, historical materials on women, anxiety and psychoactive medication in postwar America. National Library of Medicine collection
Sarah Crook, research on the Women’s Liberation Movement, grassroots activism and therapy from 1968–1985. Read the research
Historical research on natural childbirth and postnatal depression from the 1950s through the 1980s. Read the historical research
Historical research on mothers, general practitioners, the NHS and mental-health treatment in the postwar period. Read the historical research
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidance on postpartum depression and the baby blues.
Research on medical invalidation and the effects of feeling that symptoms have been minimized or dismissed. Read the research
Research on the gut-brain axis, stress and bidirectional communication between the gastrointestinal system and brain. Read the gut-brain research
Federal Reserve background on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the 1974 prohibition against discrimination based on sex or marital status in credit decisions. Federal Reserve ECOA background
👑 From the Stress Less Era 👑
Fine is not the goal. Feeling like yourself again is worth paying attention to.
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