5/24/2023 0 Comments Insanity time for changeAfter all, women who had “ungovernable” personalities and “strong resolution…plenty of what is termed nerve” were literally textbook examples of female insanity. Her psychiatrist was watching-and her unladylike emotion would justify continued incarceration. Elizabeth could not display her anger at what had happened or even hint at hatred for her husband. Every act of difference from society’s prescribed model of femininity had to be suppressed. Other treatments of the era included removal of the ovaries, the injection of ice water inside intimate orifices, and the application of leeches and caustics to the genitals.Īnd there was only one way to escape: to submit.Įlizabeth Packard grasped the harsh reality: “If remain, true to their natures, there is no hope for them.”Įvery genuine emotion had to be stifled. The theory ran that a woman’s sexual organs caused her madness, so cutting off her clitoris would calm her. Contemporary medical notes reveal that a 20-year-old woman who spent “much time in serious reading” and a 30-year-old wife who dared express “great distaste for her husband” were among those subjected to the latest treatment to cure female insanity: a clitoridectomy. And if drugs and straightjackets didn’t work, there was always surgery. Luckily, chloroform and ether were particularly effective on “boisterous” women and therefore used to quiet them-in doctors’ words-“not only temporarily but permanently.” Many asylum superintendents thought restraints such as straightjackets “rarely…necessary among males,” yet it was standard for disobedient women to be constrained. So many women were committed alongside Elizabeth that the hospital was overcrowded, with 231 patients squeezed into its 8 wards, and another 240 patients on the waiting list. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Elizabeth’s compatriots had been committed for reading novels, for “hard study” and for “insane” behavior during the “change of life.” (A woman’s menstrual cycle alone could see her committed, suffering from “uterine derangement.” Period-related madness was so commonplace that doctors encouraged mothers to delay the onset of their daughters’ menses by making them take cold baths and abstain from meat and novels.) Many of her fellow patients were also sane, but had been at the asylum for years one, guilty of “extreme jealousy,” was midway through a 16-year incarceration. When Elizabeth’s husband looked into the matter, he found he could arrange his wife’s committal simply “by the request of the husband” and specifically “without the evidence of insanity required in other cases.” As Elizabeth Packard put it: “ placed me in this insane asylum fully determined I should have a thorough dressing down, or breaking in, before he should take me out.”Īs Elizabeth assessed her situation, she saw starkly the future that awaited if she refused to submit. They were to be locked away until they conformed to more natural, feminine behavior.Īnd it was easy for the men in their lives to do it. Said one doctor after visiting a girls’ school in 1858: “You seem to be training your girls for the lunatic asylum.” Women who studied or read-or who simply had minds of their own and a determination to use them-were demonstrating “eccentricity of conduct,” which meant they were “morally insane,” a diagnosis invented by James Cowles Prichard in 1835. When, in the 19th century, biological-based gender roles came to the fore (work and intellect for men, home and children for women), it was one small step for doctors to declare that any woman who rejected her submissive, domestic role was medically impaired. For centuries, women’s natures had been thought inextricably linked to their reproductive organs and, over time, this supposedly scientific fact had evolved into the belief that it was natural for women to be fulfilled solely by being wives and mothers. The received medical wisdom of the age was that assertive, ambitious women were unnatural, and therefore sick. As she would record in a defense of her sanity that she wrote while in the asylum, she’d insisted, “I, though a woman, have just as good a right to my opinion as my husband has to his”-but assertive women in those days were swiftly dispatched to asylums, institutionalized for causing “the greatest annoyances to the family” and for defying “all domestic control.” No wonder Elizabeth had found herself on the wrong side of a locked ward door in the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, in Illinois. Elizabeth, a housewife and mother of six, had simply stood up to her domineering husband. Yet according to 19th century psychiatry, female independence was madness.
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