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A review by librarianonparade
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 by Elaine Showalter
5.0
By Victorian standards almost every modern woman would have been considered insane. That's a sobering thought, and this is a sobering read. There are many books out there on the history of mental illness and treatment, of psychology and psychiatry, asylums and chemical therapy, but so few focus on psychiatry as a female issue. And yet, as Elaine Showalter shows, for many years that is exactly what 'madness' was considered, a largely female malady, a result of the fragility of female minds. The standard representation was Ophelia, wispy and exquisite and beautiful, or Crazy Jane, wild and rebellious. Think of all those hysterical Victorian women with 'delicate nerves', lying down in darkened rooms for much of their lives, petted and sheltered, or rebellious young women locked away in homes and asylums.
Showalter's central argument is that the history of psychiatry has always been a male history, and the standards of female sanity and insanity have always been determined by societal and cultural norms of gendered moral behaviour. Whenever women deviated from these standards, devised and imposed upon them by a patriarchal society structured around the concept of masculine superiority, their behaviour was deemed aberrant, deviant, abnormal. Insane. Many such women were simply chafing against the stifling domesticity of their circumscribed lives, an impulse we can only too well understand today, and yet a hundred years or more ago this would have been deemed enough to call in the mad-doctors. To recognise and understand these women's frustrations and rebellions would have been to acknowledge their legitimacy, and this would have undermined the entire basis of gender roles in Victorian society, and indeed throughout history. Women were molded by nature to be confined to the domestic sphere, mothers and wives and daughters, and to rebel against this was to rebel against nature.
This is not to argue that all women confined to home-care or asylums were perfectly sane, victims of a blinkered, masculine-focused psychiatric profession intent on deliberately stifling the female voice. This would be unfair to both medical professions and their female patients. Many women did indeed suffer from mental imbalance, and again Showalter argues that much of this can be ascribed to unresolveable mental conflicts between their desire for freedom and independence of action and their culturally-conditioned beliefs in women's roles and place in society. She draws a parallel between these women and the shell-shock victims of the trenches, many of whom were suffering similar internal conflicts between their fear and desire to escape the horrors of war with their own cultural conditioning in masculine expectations of honour, courage, duty and sacrifice.
This was a truly fascinating read and a real eye-opener to just how much society and culture can influence what we might otherwise consider impartial standards of medicine. Deviations from the norm are considered aberrations, and yet who defines what is normal? Men, for much of history; indeed, even today. Women may not be quite so easily locked up as in the Victorian era, but our male-dominated society still largely defines the roles women are expected to perform in society. When women rebel against these roles or choose different paths for themselves, they are judged, criticised, shamed, degraded, ostracised. How far have we really come?
Showalter's central argument is that the history of psychiatry has always been a male history, and the standards of female sanity and insanity have always been determined by societal and cultural norms of gendered moral behaviour. Whenever women deviated from these standards, devised and imposed upon them by a patriarchal society structured around the concept of masculine superiority, their behaviour was deemed aberrant, deviant, abnormal. Insane. Many such women were simply chafing against the stifling domesticity of their circumscribed lives, an impulse we can only too well understand today, and yet a hundred years or more ago this would have been deemed enough to call in the mad-doctors. To recognise and understand these women's frustrations and rebellions would have been to acknowledge their legitimacy, and this would have undermined the entire basis of gender roles in Victorian society, and indeed throughout history. Women were molded by nature to be confined to the domestic sphere, mothers and wives and daughters, and to rebel against this was to rebel against nature.
This is not to argue that all women confined to home-care or asylums were perfectly sane, victims of a blinkered, masculine-focused psychiatric profession intent on deliberately stifling the female voice. This would be unfair to both medical professions and their female patients. Many women did indeed suffer from mental imbalance, and again Showalter argues that much of this can be ascribed to unresolveable mental conflicts between their desire for freedom and independence of action and their culturally-conditioned beliefs in women's roles and place in society. She draws a parallel between these women and the shell-shock victims of the trenches, many of whom were suffering similar internal conflicts between their fear and desire to escape the horrors of war with their own cultural conditioning in masculine expectations of honour, courage, duty and sacrifice.
This was a truly fascinating read and a real eye-opener to just how much society and culture can influence what we might otherwise consider impartial standards of medicine. Deviations from the norm are considered aberrations, and yet who defines what is normal? Men, for much of history; indeed, even today. Women may not be quite so easily locked up as in the Victorian era, but our male-dominated society still largely defines the roles women are expected to perform in society. When women rebel against these roles or choose different paths for themselves, they are judged, criticised, shamed, degraded, ostracised. How far have we really come?