The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980

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Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004). Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds), Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Excellent review of how little has changed in the past 150-200 years of the treatment of psychopathology in women. This is a historical piece about the experiences of women whose deviations from femininity are and have been pathologized and how cultural sexism causes psychopathological experiences, not a review/critique of the science of psychopathology, and it fulfills its purpose quite well. Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and Elaine Showalter. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and

Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 is a very informative, very accessible, and very disturbing look at how “insanity” was treated from 1830 to 1980. It examines cultural expectations about how women should behave and how these male perceptions affected the diagnosis and treatment of women’s mental health problems. Most recent work on the history of psychiatry has tended to focus on the history of institutions, of ideas, and of the psychiatric profession itself, and to ignore those for whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily put it, ‘like the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is to be welcomed, for its primary focus is upon this neglected group – for the most part, on female patients. Female writing becomes more rebellious in nature and attempts to protest male authority along with the values and standards associated with a male-dominated mentality; fighting for freedom and autonomy; refers to post-Victorian age Religious obsession, physical illness, tragic events, or love affairs were all stated causes of madness for women in this period. From 1858, some women were even incarcerated for asking for a divorce! And for pauper women, without home or money, there was often no escape from the asylum. Many women remained there until death. Arguments continue over statistics as to whether there were truly more women in Victorian asylums than men. However, in March 1879, Middlesex’s County Asylum at Hanwell housed a mere 728 males, in contrast to 1098 females (LMA ref. MJ/SP/1879/01/059).Alexander Morison, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: G. Odell, 1838), Plate VIII. The image was one of a series depicting puerperal insanity or insanity of childbirth; note the restraints and gloves, which may have been put on the patient to avoid self-harm or to prevent masturbation. Throughout history, terms of madness such as ‘lunatic’, ‘idiot’, and ‘feeble-minded’ have appeared on the records of both men and women. Yet some historians argue that women were especially vulnerable to incarceration — particularly when placed in the asylum by husbands or fathers. Causes of madness often differed between men and women. Their experiences of the asylum also contrasted. Mental health is quite a misnomer, in any case, for the most part of this book, for women were considered "mad" for the most innocuous of "offences". Suffice it to say that I wanted to set my own hair on fire while reading the travesties that women committed against society: the travesty of wanting dignity to raise their children out of poverty; the travesty of earning a decent wage for a profession of choice, and not relegated to the kitchen or the scrubhouse; the travesty of wanting a voice in how their bodies were treated; the travesty of wanting a say in society. All these were crimes for which at one time or other women were imprisoned in asylums for merely speaking their minds. Oh, and you'd definitely not want to speak your mind. That in itself is the worst travesty. Showalter later taught at Rutgers and Princeton University (neither of which hired women when she began her teaching career)

Women and Madness - The University of Warwick Women and Madness - The University of Warwick

Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL2374091M Openlibrary_editionurn:oclc:750558338 Republisher_date 20140925034845 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20140924080506 Scanner scribe5.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-11-16 16:01:39 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40763007 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Elsewhere, first through Charcot’s work, and then in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, there were experiments with a more psychologically-oriented approach. In picturing hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts beyond the individual’s control, in beginning to take ‘women’s words and women’s lives seriously’, Showalter sees psychoanalysis as potentially a major advance: but one whose promise soon dissolved, as Freud’s increasing theoretical rigidity and obsessive ‘insistence on the sexual origins of hysteria blinded him to the social factors contributing to it’. In any event, Freud’s ideas met with a particularly hostile response from many English psychiatrists, notwithstanding, in Leonard Woolf’s words, the ‘desperately meagre ... primitive and chaotic’ state of English medical knowledge of insanity on the eve of the Great War.

Female Malady? Women in the Lunatic Asylums of - Medium A Female Malady? Women in the Lunatic Asylums of - Medium

Elizabeth Foyster, ‘At the Limits of Liberty: Married Women and Confinement in Eighteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), pp.39-62. Explained in Showalter’s work A Literature of Their Own (1977); this is the phase of female writers (Jane Austen, Bronte Sisters, and other Victorian writers that struggled to have their voice heard due to male dominance and oppressive values/concepts put forth by males Showalter’s next book The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture was a historical examination of women and the practice of psychiatry Showalter coined the term gynocriticism; which refers to the literary framework that is going to assess the works of female authors and focuses on critiquing their work without using terminologies used and developed by male critics and authors, as using that sets the women writers at a disadvantageNancy M. Theriot, ‘Women’s Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step toward Deconstructing Science’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19 (1993), 1-31. e-journal Mark S. Micale (ed.) , The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2004), esp chs 1-2. Portrait of Mad Margery, a young woman driven mad and living in the fields, possibly taken from a popular song ‘Poor Mad Margery’ c.1790-1800. By James John Hill c.1830-70.