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

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In institutions containing several hundred, even a thousand and more inmates, alienists struggled to produce a simulacrum of the domestic scene, in the process revealing and reproducing, as Showalter describes it, ‘structures of class and gender that were “moral”, that is, “normal”, by their own standards’. One of the biggest problems with this book was that by only looking at women's treatment she failed to see what was gendered treatment and ideas and what was practice for everyone. 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. Yet when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement. The Early Victorian period saw the creation of a whole new network of public asylums, coupled with a system of national inspection of receptacles for the mad by the Lunacy Commissioners.

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

In the same vein, she would often ignore a thorough analysis of a source simply for the point of an argument.By attracting the attention of a boy working in the garden of the house next door, Hannah escaped after throwing down money and then her shoe – which she hoped, Cinderella-like, would identify her.

The Female Malady) - Goodreads Elaine Showalter Quotes (Author of The Female Malady) - Goodreads

Many took a harshly moralistic view of the emotionally incapacitated, suggesting that shell-shock cases should be court-martialled and shot for malingering or cowardice. It would perhaps be more supportable to suggest, on a more expansive view of what constitutes mental illness, that women are more frequently troubled in mind. Showalter has such an engaging style, you'll be thinking you're reading just another gothic novel, but by the time you're through, you'll be scared to death. For my interests, I would have loved more time spent on the more recent years, but that would have made it unbalanced in treatment.In other words whether someone was a man or woman became their most important distinguishing feature which I thought created its own gendered differences. Nancy Theriot, ‘Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century Physicians and “Puerperal Insanity”’, American Studies, 26 (1990), 69-88, reprinted in Judith Walzer Leavitt (ed. Elizabeth Foyster, ‘At the Limits of Liberty: Married Women and Confinement in Eighteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), pp. Some were diagnosed as neurasthenics or anorexics (a condition recognised for the first time in 1873): but the most common diagnosis was unquestionably hysteria. Many faced disciplinary therapies which included stressed quick cures, shaming, physical re-education, and in some of the worst cases – electric faradization.