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. Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004).

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

if you want an insight into the imbalance between genders and how they were treated for mental health related issues in the not-so-distant past then this is the read for you. surprisingly easy to dip in and out of, and not as dense as i was expecting. 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. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-06-14 14:31:24 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1127915 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York, N.Y., U.S.A. Donor 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. 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. Until women break free for themselves, the chains that make madness a female malady, like Blake's "mind forged manacles," will simply forge themselves anew.”Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL2374091M Openlibrary_edition 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. 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). Showalter’s first book began as her doctoral thesis, turning into A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing I read this book from cover to cover and would have been very happy if it were a school text. One of the things I liked most about the book was its personal approach, using the perspectives of female "inmates" themselves, and fiction excerpts from a variety of authors, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte, Doris Lessing, and others to highlight women's mental health issues and experiences with doctors and provide an insight into the culture and period.

THE FEMALE MALADY? MEN, WOMEN AND - JSTOR

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.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. 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 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. Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), ch. 6 ‘Mad Women’. Multiple copies in library

The Female Malady? Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth

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 disadvantage urn:oclc:record:1357633858 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier femalemaladywome0000show Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2x398vp0vw Invoice 1652 Isbn 0860688690 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9510 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1300185 Openlibrary_edition urn:lcp:femalemalady00elai:epub:6ac50138-73e7-43aa-84e9-78e33298d69f Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier femalemalady00elai Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t27970d6j Invoice 11 Isbn 0140101691 Lccn 87002222 Louise Hide, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890-1914 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). e-bookCatharine Coleborne, Reading ‘Madness’: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum System in Victoria, Australia, 1848-1888 (Perth: AP Network, 2007).