Female : The Social Epidemic Samantha Franco

A note on the author: Samantha Franco is a fourth-year student at the University of Guelph, currently working towards her undergraduate degree in Honours History. Her passion for women’s history is a driving force behind her research, and she hopes to complete her Masters at Western University in her hometown of London, Ontario.

Science has continuously been an unforgiving field for women. Ignored through most of its existence, women have had little to no identity in . When they finally were considered worthy of analysis, they were demonized under the foundation of emotional irrationality. The Victorian era of the nineteenth century is an excellent case study in the understanding of the medical oppression of women. During a time of intense and fragile male-female relationships, this period brought with it one of the most influential of female institutionalization: hysteria. In this regard, hysteria served a purpose outside of a scientific context. In the community, hysteria acted as a platform for maintaining male dominance within a drastic power imbalance. It suppressed women, satisfied male insecurities about the female body, and inadvertently vied for the conforming of Victorian gender norms. Jean-Martin Charcot himself manipulated his findings to fit into the social understanding of male and female roles, popularizing his theories and his reputation alongside a dramatically shifting Western society. Hysteria became the scapegoat of unexplainable or uncontrollable female behaviour. The male community was supported at this time by the male-dominant field of science in isolating women for their radical misbehaviour. The mass incarceration of women into asylums became the product of these factors working collectively in the oppression of women. Hysteria held a much more social context than a scientific one, and the characteristics of Victorian society both popularized and naturalized the concept of the deranged woman. The Victorian era was a period of strict codes of social conduct. All members of society were placed into tight, detailed castes that controlled their behaviour in both the public and private spheres. Within these castes, even stricter gender roles were enforced to maintain the status quo in a rapidly changing society. During the height of industrialization and urbanization, the Victorian era brought about many in the power of the patriarchy, as the changing society allowed women to vie for more liberties. To combat this threat of power, the field of psychiatry was used as a scapegoat to oppress Victorian women en masse. As psychiatry at this time was in a very significant stage of development, the easily manipulated diagnosis of hysteria could be and was used outside of a scientific context. Introduced on a biological platform, hysteria perfectly supported male dominance and female irrationality. As hysteria progressively became the accepted and explainable diagnosis of female misbehaviour, women’s lunacy solved the problem of threats to male superiority. As men were given practically all socio-economic autonomy during the Victorian era, they could control the path in which a woman would be moved from the public sphere to the private sphere and from the private sphere to the asylum without much contention. Unable to argue or explain their symptoms, women were diagnosed based on the strictly male and adversely broad understanding of hysteria. As this could be argued as an attempt to better the hysteric woman, the morality of incarcerating these women by was widely accepted. Institutionalization camouflaged the true intent behind the popular diagnosis, and became the preferred method of female oppression, causing a significantly large number of women to be moved into asylums. This nervous disorder became a common platform of male dominance and successfully maintained the power imbalance of the patriarchal society. The male experience of the Victorian era was filled with insecurities about the woman and her power. At this time, men were in a place of higher power, and so there was a significant gap between the rights of men and the rights of women. This created a critical power imbalance. In both the public and private spheres, men held authority over women. Women were of little interest in the realms of education, politics, and business. Men in the general public did not explore or try to understand the female body – she was subordinate and did not require analysis. It was during this time that the evolutionary conceptions of Darwin and Spencer came to be the popular opinion of the public as well. Their assurances of sexual differentiation confirmed the theory of female subordination.8 As historian of British history Ben Griffin explains, there was “a concerted effort to reassert clear distinctions between gender roles and root them in essential biological differences… that justified female submission.”9 However, with this effort, there came a folly – their choice to ignore the female body perpetuated their insecurities of the power it held. Because they did not understand the woman, they were afraid of her. The little understanding they had of women rested upon the idea that they were creatures of irrational emotion and unpredictable behaviour. Women were thus confined to the private sphere and were required to live out their domestic duties with little to no socio-economic identity. It was here that they could be contained, monitored, and controlled. Within this oppressive environment, women were expected to adhere to strict gender roles, causing severe and that manifested into a variety of forms and reactions.10 Women could experience paraplegia, seizures, hallucinations, or uncharacteristic sexual urges among many other symptoms. These, at the time, were unexplainable reactions that required a solution. Husbands, brothers, and fathers took it upon themselves to take care of the perceived problem at hand. Turning to the still-developing medical field of psychiatry, men were able to justify the incarceration of women in asylums as almost all of their symptoms fell under the umbrella of hysteria. Hysteria became an outlet where men who struggled to control the behaviours of their wives could ensure their subordination in an even more controlled environment: the asylum. It is in this light that hysteria can be categorized as a classic disease of the nineteenth-century bourgeois society.11 As psychiatry was in its earlier stages of understanding, many concepts were flexible in their diagnoses, symptoms, and

8 Jane Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in the Victorian England (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991), 182. 9 Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 39. 10 Oppenheim, 181. 11 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1985), 197. treatments. As a result, men were able to manipulate the psychiatric system to house their rebellious female neighbours. While tensions were rising within the male-female relationship, hysteria became a popular outlet to maintain the societal power men had over women. This caused hysteria to become a distinctly female disease and further popularized its diagnosis. Hysteria became a common form of female oppression during the Victorian era and in the process began to lose its scientific platform. As it was such a broad concept, far too many symptoms could result in its diagnosis, and so women of all ages and degrees of “nervous weakness” could have been institutionalized.12 Its loose symptoms allowed men to point the finger of hysteria on any woman who acted out of the Victorian status quo. A frenzied witch-hunt began that institutionalized women as lunatics nearly twice as frequently as that of men.13 Asylums became the most appropriate place to try and reform restless women, and female insanity was the best way to get them there. Take, for example, the case of Constance Kent. Kent was a young woman who confessed to the murder of her 3-year- old brother in 1865.14 Offering no motive for her actions, she was sentenced to death, but not without a great effort from the community to offer her a plea of insanity.15 Madness became such an understood concept of female behaviour that Constance, as a young woman of the Victorian era, would have been able to escape the death sentence despite her confession. The concept of female insanity was so popular that the community advocated for her to plead insanity. Female misbehaviour was rationalized by hysteria, and it became easier to incarcerate women into the rapidly growing number of asylums being created than it was to incarcerate them into jailhouses.16 Hysteria offered a platform for male dominance to persist in Victorian society and as such women were diagnosed and institutionalized en masse. In the science of psychiatry, the concept of hysteria is most commonly linked to the works and findings of Jean-Martin Charcot. Beginning his career in psychiatry at Salpêtrière, Charcot was surrounded by a variety of patients, which offered him the ability to choose the focus of his studies. The neuropathologist focused the bulk of his work on hysteria, looking specifically at the deranged woman. As psychiatry at this time was a male-dominant field, it is no surprise that a man headed the research of analyzing the female mind and body. With no other professional focusing in this area during his time of studies, Charcot became the trusted word on the understanding of hysteria. Prior to his focus on the disease, he was a well-trusted name in the study of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and strokes, and so his reputation granted him the support of his colleagues.17 In time, Charcot became the chief physician at Salpêtrière and was provided

12 Laura Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth- Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2000): 246. 13 Andrew Scull, Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 316. 14 Samantha Pegg, “‘Madness is a Woman’: Constance Kent and Victorian Constructions of Female Insanity,” Liverpool Law Review 30, no. 3 (2009): 209. 15 Ibid., 210. 16 Scull, 315. 17 Julien Bogousslavsky, “Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma,” Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, 34 (2014): 47. with the resources to go into great depth in the study of hysteria. Through the manipulation of his studies, Charcot was able to support his theories and prove that his findings within hysteria were legitimate. His portrayal of the disease, and how he chose to describe the female patient, was observational of his findings. However, it exaggerated the severity of the disease and reflected in the community a much different perspective than was actually experienced. It sensationalized hysteria and made the scope of symptoms much wider, including more and more women in its diagnosis. As his number of pupils grew with his popularity, his work was continued following the same approach as his own. As no opposing view was established during his career, Charcot was able to present his findings through his preferred method and shape the public perspective of female insanity as he saw fit. As this field of study operated like a vacuum with little to no outside influence, Charcot monopolized the study of female derangement and used the social tensions of the Victorian era to support his theories on the hysteric woman. During his career at Salpêtrière, Charcot and his colleagues produced a series detailing the symptoms and experiences of hysteric women titled Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière.18 Through this series, he illustrates the behaviours of women throughout the four stages of hysteria: the epileptoid stage, the period of clownism, the stage of “attitudes passionnelle,” and delirium.19 In portraying his analysis through photography, Charcot took a very interesting and telling approach. By doing so, he was able to manipulate the portrayal of hysteria and shape how the public received it. Given the socially claustrophobic time in which hysteria was popularized, the hysteric women became the complete opposite of the Victorian woman. It depicted how nonconforming looked. The overwhelming diagnosis of women thus moved in tandem with the findings of Charcot – they complimented each other. The community supported Charcot’s findings, granting him the title of expert in the study of hysteria and allowed him to continue his research under the assumption that his theories were true. Charcot then provided the public with the justification necessary to submit misbehaving women to institutions. Given his history as an artist, he used photography in an otherwise artless field to show the artistry of madness: the beautifully demented.20 In this fashion, placing a woman in the height of her fits in front of the camera caused an artistic direction to be established as it only caught the moments Charcot felt necessary to include. So too, this woman may unknowingly exaggerate her movements given the pressure and allure of the camera, increasing the visual severity of the disease. This series was extremely influential on the general public’s knowledge of hysteria. The Iconographie not only described the symptoms of hysteria but also showed how it looked. As it failed to suggest a spectrum of severity, the male community could misconstrue the findings of the Iconographie and apply them to various members of their community. This included women of the bourgeois class, as well as women of lesser means and prostitutes. Charcot’s interpretation of hysteria offered no boundaries, and so all women could be victims of hysteria.

18 Daphne De Marneffe, “Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud,” Signs 17, no. 1 (1991): 71. 19 Ibid., 76. 20 D. Walsh, “Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpetriere and George Sigerson: A Note.” Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine 31, no. 3 (2014): 213. As Charcot was able to monopolize the study of hysteria, he became the best resource for educating future neurologists. Confident in his work at Salpêtrière, Charcot began focusing his lectures on hysteria. By 1882, one-third of Charcot’s academic lectures were assigned to the topic.21 Dedicating such a significant amount of attention to the subject, the concept of hysteria became popularized in its studies alone. Increasingly more young professionals were turning to neurology, and more specifically hysteria, as their focus of study. In theory, this seems as though it would benefit the women of the Victorian era, as Charcot’s findings would no longer be the only ones available. However, a negative effect came from the lectures of Charcot. As he was such a trusted name in the studies of neurology, many students fell under his mentorship and adopted his theories. This continued his findings and perpetuated the oppressive nature of hysteria. For example, within his teachings, Charcot suggests isolation as the most successful form of treatment among young women.22 As such, women were not only being isolated to the institutions but were being isolated within the asylums themselves. Beyond the supposed benefits of this treatment, Charcot was encouraging the young men who occupied the next generation of neurology to continue to isolate these women.23 It was the solution to the male problem of female disobedience. As women held no autonomy in the field of science, the effects that isolation had on women were unimportant and controversial at best. Through this method, a woman could experience further mental derangement, as they were left to their thoughts and feelings of estrangement.24 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a diagnosed hysteric during this period, was so affected by the isolation treatment that she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel describing in detail her mental deterioration.25 It was not until , one of Charcot’s most famous pupils, that there was any contestation regarding the analysis of Charcot. Where he fondly respected the work of his mentor, Freud sought to study hysteria based on physiological experiences on the human psyche rather than the biological nature Charcot had proposed.26 This opened a new branch of analysis in the study of hysteria. Unfortunately, this area of analysis was not discovered until after the death of Charcot, and so the Victorian era maintained its oppressive nature on female lunacy. In the analysis of science, it can be said that all areas of study have generally been of male-dominant fields. This is a troublesome factor when trying to understand the functions of diseases, as the male and female body are fundamentally different. Biologically determined to experience different components of human life, the woman was a foreign concept of study during the Victorian period. As hysteria was primarily a woman’s disease, the male professional struggled to understand the true workings of the female body and brain; an integral approach in trying to understand these issues was

21 De Marneffe, 74. 22 Jean Martin Charcot, Clinical Lectures on Certain Diseases of the Nervous System (Detroit: George S. Davis, 1888), 45. 23 Ibid., 47. 24 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Auckland, N.Z.: The Floating Press, 2009). 25 Ibid. 26 De Marneffe, 92. through the reproductive system. In regards to the portrayal of the woman, Andrew Mangham explains, “the female reproductive system has, from very early on, been cast as the riddle of all riddles.”27 Not knowing its full purpose or power, men understood the reproductive system as a threat to their position of power. Following the Victorian power imbalance, men were able to justify the unnecessary emotional characteristics that women felt, and men did not as a result of this system. It became a scapegoat for the attributes of women that were different from that of a man. In this sense, women were greatly misunderstood. The lack of a female presence in the study of the female body caused the misrepresentation of a variety of diseases, including hysteria. As they already identified the woman as ‘different,’ the portrayal of this disease sprouted a negative interpretation. In the study of the Victorian woman, it is critical to understand that “individual consciousness […] is dependent upon the physical and mental interventions practiced by one’s society.”28 The pressures of society on the expectations of women were completely different and much more drastic than the pressures of men in Victorian society. In this way, not only was a male-dominated field diagnosing and treating women with a disease they could not fully comprehend, but they also could not comprehend why women were behaving in such an unfavourable fashion. There was a blatant disconnect between the study of women and the actual experiences they had. Attacking this problem from a strictly male perspective only made it worse. When analyzing the Victorian period, it is important to note that the field of science and medicine was an extremely unforgiving area of study for women. Not only did it ignore the female as an object of study, worthy of analysis and understanding, but it also excluded the woman as a professional in the field. The rhetoric of many academic sources generalizes the physician, neurologist, and psychiatrist, as male in gender. A female professional was extremely uncommon, if not a non-existent concept. So, when the female body finally fell under the lens of medical analysis, it became the primary target of male dominance. All components of female sexuality became the unofficial responsibility of the male community – their determined as the main source of a woman’s emotional state of mind.29 As science expanded into the field of psychiatry, women’s emotionality was established as the stem of female lunacy. Considering that hysteria was described as a disease of the nerves, and the nineteenth century was a time of great social tension projected onto the Victorian woman, it became the best description for the ‘epidemic’ of female misbehaviour. During the height of its diagnosis, the disease became a testimony to the sensitivity experienced as a result of the refined and civilized lifestyle of the Victorian bourgeoisie.30 In the time of Charcot, the male community looked to the male-dominant field of science to explain the failing social hierarchy. The gendered bias criminalized women and targeted them as the cause of social disruption. A newfound strength was discovered when combining the influences of the psychiatric field and public, and in turn, initiated the mass institutionalization of the hysteric woman.

27 Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 34. 28 Catherine Burrough and Jeffrey Ehrenreich, Reading the Social Body (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 41. 29 Mangham, 51. 30 Martin Edwards, “Hysteria”, The Lancet 374, no. 9702 (2012): 1669. The social environment of the Victorian era provided the perfect formula for the institutionalization of women. The tensions between genders experienced in this period were not new, however, as women were targeted as scapegoats long before the nineteenth century. The witch-hunts of Scotland in the seventeenth century are a good example of this and quite distinctly mirror the cause and effect of this mass persecution. During this time, female sexuality was arguably feared more than in the Victorian era. This idea of the weak, emotional woman was well established in seventeenth-century Scotland and as such women were considered more easily persuaded by sexual desires.31 King James I of England even created a guidebook, the Daemonologie, outlining how to identify and how to persecute a woman believed to be a witch.32 Despite its less obvious attack on women, Victorian society used hysteria as their guidebook for identifying and institutionalizing women. As with most periods of social turmoil, the community took on the responsibility of persecuting those women who fell out of the status quo. Women have always had strict gender roles forced upon them, and even during the seventeenth century, the slightest deviation would rattle the fragile social balance. Beyond the mysticism driving the witch- hunts, they became a primarily social phenomenon. Much like the Victorian era, the community was able to persecute these women without evidential cause, and so they became the easiest target to place blame. Both periods operated along a similar system of patriarchal oppression, and so the processes of the witch-hunt phenomenon occurred repeatedly throughout history. Hysteria began its lifespan on a scientific platform. As time progressed, societal pressures of the Victorian era caused it to lose its scientific perspective and transform into a form of social oppression. The power of women was feared in the nineteenth-century community, and their lack of identity in the field of science assumed their position as a patriarchal scapegoat. Charcot’s definition of hysteria provided the explanation necessary to institutionalize these women en masse, and so women became victim to a disease whose symptoms were vague and whose treatments were harsh. The Victorian period is a critical example of female oppression in the field of psychiatry, and the study of hysteria serves a much greater purpose, reflecting the nature of the society at the time.

31 Sierra Dye, “To Converse with the Devil? Speech, Sexuality, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland,” International Review of Scottish Studies 37 (2012): 10. 32 King James I, Daemonologie (London: Robert Waldgrave, 1597), 26. Bibliography

Primary Sources Charcot, Jean Martin. Clinical Lectures on Certain Diseases of the Nervous System. Detroit: George S. David, 1888. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Auckland, N.Z.: The Floating Press, 2009. King James I. Daemonologie. London: Robert Waldgrave, 1597. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25929/25929-h/25929-h.html

Secondary Sources Arieno, Marlene A. Victorian Lunatics: A Social Epidemiology of Mental Illness in Mid- Nineteenth-Century England. London: Associated University Press, 1989. Bogousslavsky, J. “Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma.” Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience 34 (2014): 44-55. Briggs, Laura. “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology.” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2000): 246-273. Burrough, Catherine B. and Jeffrey Ehrenreich. Reading the Social Body. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1993. De Marneffe, Daphne. “Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud.” Signs 17, no. 1 (1991): 71-111. Dye, Sierra. “To Converse with the Devil? Speech, Sexuality, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland.” International Review of Scottish Studies, 37 (2012): 9-40 Edwards, Martin. “Hysteria.” The Lancet 374, no. 9702 (2009): 1669. Griffin, Ben. The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Mangham, Andrew and Greta Depledge. The Female Body in Medicine and Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Oppenheim, Jane. “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pegg, Samantha. “‘Madness is a Woman’: Constance Kent and Victorian Constructions of Female Insanity.” Liverpool Law Review 30, no. 3 (2009): 207-223. Scull, Andrew. Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1985. Walsh, D. “Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpetriere and George Sigerson: a note.” Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine 31, no. 3 (2014): 213-215. Ussher, Jane M. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.