Valley of the Dolls could be seen as a clarion call that wasn’t heeded by future generations hooked on cocaine and opioids. The characters’ reliance on prescription pills — partly for their weight-loss effects, which parallel the use of Ozempic and other semaglutides today — and week-long “sleep cures” to fix all their problems even foreshadows our current wellness obsession. The narrative also cautions that while the current “trad wife” influencer boom romanticises that era and earlier as a simpler time without so many pressures, women have always struggled to juggle career, family and societal demands.