Female Hysteria: 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 psychiatry. 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 diseases 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 anxieties 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 disease 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 anxiety and depression 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.