In addition, women without husbands were seen as more likely to contract ‘melancholy’, a telling sign of common perceptions of female traits and needs.

Much like the women throughout history we see accused of witchcraft and punished accordingly, hysteria diagnosis reflects the consequences for women when they did not conform to societal expectations, an attempt to control women who were not following the rules. The label was also linked to ideas of love and lovesickness the overwhelming difference between a man and a woman was perceived to be a woman’s weakness and emotion. A similar lack of knowledge surrounding mental illness emerged in the last 300 years, and hysteria became a common female diagnosis in part due to women’s rigid role as the emotional support in a family. The idea of the female malady was supposedly born in Ancient Egypt, due to a lack of understanding of the womb and uterus. Madness and gender have been inextricably linked for centuries in a medical context, a heavy truth which has finally begun, in the last few decades,to lose its power, but still has echoes in society today. Shockingly, this was a term still being used by medical groups in the 1950s, and, similarly to other historical medical theories, the idea of Female Malady was highly influenced by surrounding culture. Women, Madness, and the Family: R.D.For centuries, women in western Europe suffering from a long list of, sometimes vague, symptoms – including anxiety, loss of sexual desire, or too much sexual desire, insomnia and being ‘difficult’- could find themselves being labelled with the common medical diagnosis of ‘female hysteria’. Feminism and Hysteria: the Daughter’s Diseaseħ. Nervous Women: Sex Roles and Sick RolesĦ. On the Borderland: Henry Maudsley and Psychiatric Darwinismĥ.

Domesticating insanity: John Conolly and Moral ManagementĤ. Highly original and beautifully written, The Female Malady is a vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.ġ. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women ‘to their senses’, she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing, to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness. In this informative, timely and often harrowing study, Elaine Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about ‘proper’ feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, Culture, 1830-1980

The female malady