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

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Numerous historians have engaged themselves with the question of whether psychiatry, particularly 19 th-century psychiatry, discriminated against women, or at least singled women out as especially vulnerable to being categorised as mentally ill and confined in asylums. Hilary Marland, ‘At Home with Puerperal Mania: The Domestic Treatment of the Insanity of Childbirth in the Nineteenth Century’, in Outside the Walls of the Asylum, pp. Women were described, in the words of playwright Henry Fielding, as especially sensitive and subject to extremes of feeling and expression. It didn't quite do what it was intending to do, but nonetheless there are some really interesting parts and some good insight, particularly into the gender divisions of Victorian society.

Dazeland · LRB 29 October 1987 Andrew Scull · Dazeland · LRB 29 October 1987

I couldn't help but wonder why she'd not looked at actual case notes from the institute of psychiatry instead. But I was gladly mistaken - her arguments are very nuanced and focused and made me think about facets of the topic I hadn't previously. This incisive study explores how cultural ideas about proper feminine behavior have shaped the definition and treatment of madness in women as it traces trends in the psychiatric care of women in England from 1830-1980.Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television. Such changes reflected a revulsion against earlier methods of managing the mad, and an astonishing (and in the event sadly misplaced) optimism about the therapeutic effects of the new system of moral management.

Women, Madness, and Literature - Brill

But war neurosis was four times more common among officers than among men, and for the most part, there was reluctance to treat gentlemen in such overtly harsh and brutal ways. Once this was disproven, other theories were tested and also disproved, and the term shell shock became known as ill-chosen and inaccurate.Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780-1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. As an organism dominated by her uterus and ovaries, and hence by crisis and periodicity, a woman necessarily possessed greater capacities for affection and aptitude for child-rearing, a preference for the domestic hearth and a ‘natural’ purity and moral sensibility: but she was also inescapably a creature in whom the emotional predominated over the rational, someone whose physiological equipment was of surpassing delicacy and fragility, at any moment liable to give way under the strains of modern life or the unavoidably perilous passage through puberty, pregnancy, parturition, lactation, menstruation and the menopause. 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.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, - Springer

In turn, these wars “ feminized [their] conscripts by taking away their sense of control” (Showalter 173). Here she tried to present that the soldiers were suffering from hysteria, and were treated in the same way as the women. It may be that women’s autobiographical novels ‘transform the experiences of shock, psychosurgery and chemotherapy into symbolic episodes of punishment for intellectual ambition, domestic defiance and sexual autonomy’: but this is surely too crude and self-serving a portrait to accept at face value.Religious obsession, physical illness, tragic events, or love affairs were all stated causes of madness for women in this period. Meanwhile, in a veritable paroxysm of inventiveness, asylum psychiatry experimented with malarial therapy, metrazol-induced seizures, insulin comas, electroshock treatment, lobotomies and finally ataraxic drugs, notably Largactil, the ‘mighty drug’ that was to be our culture’s magic potion against the ravages of schizophrenia.