the myth of female hysteria: from lobotomies to literature
my senior thesis research paper about the roots and history behind calling a woman crazy ! shortened just a tad for your reading pleasure :)
Deriving from the ancient Greek word “hysterikos,” the word hysteria, meaning “of the womb,” has been used to justify the medical and social mistreatment of women and girls since it was coined by Greek physician Hippocrates in the 5th century BCE. The diagnosis, over its 2000-year history, has been used to cover everything from premenstrual syndrome to depression to homosexuality to simple sexual desire. At its core, this disregard for female needs in the name of a mythical umbrella diagnosis of hysteria is and will always be an ongoing historical, cultural, and social phenomenon.
Naturally, it was believed that hysteria, also known as neurasthenia in certain medical circles, could be triggered by a plethora of bad habits including reading books, masturbation, and homosexual or bisexual tendencies resulting in any number of symptoms such as seductive behaviors, functional paralysis, irrationality, and general troublemaking of various kinds.
Plato and Aristotle, commonly considered founders of Western philosophy and thought, famously shared many incorrect opinions and beliefs retaining to the female body and mind– cementing a systemic misunderstanding of women in the basis of Western society. Plato, believing that the uterus “roams” through the female body on a cycle, thought that women were thrown into disequilibrium and disease due to their uterus— leading to the idea of the “wandering womb” that is still used in modern conversations spanning every field. On the other hand, Aristotle generally saw women as malformed men, most likely attributed to the ancient pagan Greek creation myth surrounding Gaia and the Cosmos. Modern medical historians and other academic figures have noted that Aristotle found that “female nature was a mutilated kind of male nature and more or less monstrous, perceived in any case as very negative.” The philosopher and physician Galen however disagreed with the roving uterus theory, believing instead that the retention of ‘female seed’ within the womb was to blame for the anxiety, insomnia, depression, irritability, fainting, and other symptoms women experienced. Ancient attitudes such as these are some of the culprits to our current problems in the healthcare ecosystem and the continuous marginalization found under the myth of hysteria.
Much of the diagnosis has its modern roots in the witching period, superstition, and religious ideals. With origins in late medieval Europe, the practice of accusing witchcraft waters down to religious fear and widespread paranoia of the unexplained. From the late decades of the medieval period up until about 1650, continental Europeans executed between 200,000 and 500,000 witches, 85% or more of whom were thought to be women and girls. Beginning with a papal bull issued in 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII denouncing witchcraft, powerful religious figures across the continent seized upon the opportunity to justify their hunts on “demonic” figures within their kingdoms. The most prominent work from this period is German Catholic Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (commonly translated as “The Hammer of Witches”). The extensive religious handbook was meant to guide the identification and treatment of witches in 1486, recommending both torture and deception to obtain confessions from those accused of witchcraft.
In essence, the widespread general fear of moral impurity as it infringed upon the ability to reach Heaven was a genuinely dangerous moral panic that mixed class, religion, gender, and fantastical imaginings. There are several theories as to why the European witching period happened, such as Catholicism and Protestantism vying for dominance in the wake of the European Wars of Religion (1522-1648) and the Little Ice Age (1303-1850) that caused widespread loss of crops and livestock that resulted in sickness and starvation. While such events may have been influenced by more wide-scale historical happenings, the persecution of thought-to-be witchcraft was more likely fuelled by greedy and unscrupulous witch-hunters, who stood to make considerable financial gains from finding and executing so-called witches in large numbers.
Entering the colonial period, such practices naturally followed settlers to the “new world,” including the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 that saw the wrongful imprisonment of 150 innocent Salem settlers, including a four-year-old girl, and the execution of 19 victims— 14 of whom were women. In the end, the tragedy in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony came down to control: In the wake of their persecution, the God-fearing, patriarchal Puritan society was determined to preserve its way of life and belief system at any cost. The typecast image of a woman accused of witchcraft goes like this: social outcast, economically isolated, sexually active, and/or of foreign origin. Such attributes bring to light the core theme of the phenomena concerning the myth of hysteria: a clear scapegoat for society’s hatred of imperfect women.
The story of Saint Jeanne d’Arc, an icon of the French nation and women in Catholic martyrdom, is the most famous example of hysteria in the name of religious purity. By the age of thirteen, Jeanne, a peasant girl from western France, began hearing voices and experiencing visions that she interpreted as a prophecy from God. Leading a command of over 4,000 soldiers at the hand of King Charles, Jeanne successfully seized Orleans, a long-held stronghold of the English campaign in France. After being captured by English forces, Jeanne was forced by her captors to do 15 examinations, both public and private, before being subjected to a trial in an ecclesiastical court, which found her guilty of heresy. A translation of her trial records stated that “the poison of heresy” had had a transformative effect, turning her into a “member of Satan.” It was determined that Jeanne was“a blasphemer against God,” and thus she was burnt at the stake in 1431 in Rouen, Normandy where it is said she died of smoke inhalation before the flames consumed her; killed for the same thing she was heralded for only years before. Today, modern psychologists and historians believe that Jeanne suffered from schizophrenia and epilepsy.
In 1748, French physician Joseph Raulin described hysteria as a “vaporous ailment” — affection vaporeuse in French — an illness spread through air pollution in large urban areas. And while Raulin noted that both men and women could contract hysteria, women were, according to him, more predisposed to this ailment because of their lazy and irritable nature. One of Raulin’s Parisian colleagues, François Boissier de Sauvages, believed much similarly to the likes of Sigmund Freud, that female hysteria was something akin to emotional instability, “subject to sudden changes with the great sensibility of the soul.” According to De Sauvages, sexual deprivation was often the cause of female hysteria. To illustrate this, he presented the case study of a nun affected by hysteria, who became cured only when a well-wishing barber took it upon himself to pleasure her. The idea that without male influence and interaction, women would be driven to madness remained a consensus in the psychoanalytic community up to the mid-twentieth century.
Numerous 19th-century practitioners gained fame as so-called “hysteria doctors.” Silas Weir Mitchell, a prominent Philadelphia physician and early psychologist, was one of them. By promoting his “rest-cure” as a treatment for feminine instability, Mitchell believed that if a woman was to be confined to a space for long enough, she would naturally resolve from all heresy. By contrast, physicians like Mitchell would advise men with hysteria to engage in lots of outdoor exercise and social interactions like sports and politics. To fully connect the physical to the mental in the case of vast misunderstanding of female anatomy, some 19th-century doctors infamously argued that problems within the genitalia could cause psychological problems in women: including hysteria and madness. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist who rose to immense prominence in North America, opted to perform invasive surgeries, such as hysterectomies and removal of the clitoris, to “cure” female patients of hysteria, most likely following in the footsteps of J. Marion Sims’ experimentation on enslaved African American women.
Throughout Western history, as it pertains to ongoing colonialism and the birth of the eugenics movements, forced sterilization has developed into one of the most widely practiced forms of “detaining” female hysteria at its source. When a woman was considered ill, hysterical, or uneasy and sent to a state hospital, she could be given an IQ or other intelligence test to determine her state. If the test didn’t provide the results that the authorities wanted, she could be forcibly sterilized without the consent of herself or her family. This may seem like it’s directly out of some sort of dystopian novel like George Orwell’s 1984 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but this was the case for thousands of women and girls of color. In 1883, British scientist Sir Francis Galton named the idea of selective breeding and control of the marginalized “eugenics,” drawing from the ancient Greek word meaning “to be well born.” Countries across the world, including the United States, Canada, and Sweden enacted sterilization campaigns to disperse undesirable groups— most commonly native and indigenous groups, non-European immigrants, the physically disabled, and the hysterical. From 1907 to 1979, U.S. policies enforced the sterilization of over 60,000 people with 32 states passing laws that mandated forcible sterilization for women deemed “mentally defective or incompetent.” This label, as expressed throughout this thesis, was typically applied based on the prejudice of the officials who proctored them and unfair intelligence tests that were linguistically and culturally biased against most immigrant populations. In the state of California, where an “asexualization” law stood for almost 100 years, Latina women were 59% more likely to be given a forcible hysterectomy than other women.
In the twentieth century, modern medicine continued to fund the myth of female hysteria, this time in a different font: the lobotomy. Established as a cure for a multitude of mental health conditions following World War Two, the lobotomy was a procedure in which an ice pick-like tool was inserted through the nostril to damage the frontal lobe of the brain. The procedure didn’t just pertain to mental illness either– with many recipients simply being LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, sexually active, or mildly stressed. Even though a majority of those institutionalized were men, women made up a majority of those who received the procedure. According to a 1951 National Institute of Health study, nearly 60% of American lobotomy patients were women, and further data shows that 74% of lobotomies in Ontario, Canada were performed on female patients. At a time when women were expected to be calm, cooperative, and attentive to the home, definitions of mental illness were as culturally bound as their treatments— and the health of said women was sidelined in favor of civil peace and conformity to the comfortable nuclear family structure. The lobotomy, a surgery that rendered female patients docile and compliant, had many proponents before the drug chlorpromazine, the first “major” tranquilizer, became available. All while thousands of patients suffered from violent medical malpractice, Portuguese doctor António Egas Moniz, the putative inventor of the lobotomy, won a Nobel Prize in 1949 for his work. Upon modern research, medical remedies of the mid-twentieth century prove to be wildly ineffective and dangerous, with the entire medical community disregarding the practice of lobotomizing the mentally ill altogether. The disproportionate use of lobotomies and tranquilizers by doctors as therapies for female patients,many of whom were not mentally ill, exemplifies how gender bias in the name of curing hysteria has shaped twentieth-century medicine.
Since the beginning of the field of psychology, women have been seen as a problem to solve. Sigmund Freud, arguably one of the most influential figures in studying human behavior and psychoanalytics, began his career by studying the “female condition.” By blaming hysteria on women’s innate gender weakness, Freud created a foundational belief held by misogynists and anti-feminists alike. He explained the increased incidence in the Victorian era to be a result of the more powerful taboos of their highly civilized society, resulting in the deterioration of the female being because of the complexity of the era. Like many of his subsequent studies, Freud theorized that the symptoms were a result of a woman’s inner conflict due to repressed sexual memories. Likewise, Freud’s long-standing theory of “Penis Envy” suggests that female hysteria and instability stem partly from childhood when girls realize they lack male genitalia and many of whom were not mentally ill, exemplifies how gender bias in the name of curing hysteria has shaped twentieth-century medicine.
American academic Caroll Smith-Rosenberg outlines a challenging viewpoint to that of Freud’s female hysteria: social suppression. She claims the women of the period are constantly responding to social suppression, that “the hysterical woman can be seen as both a product and indictment of her culture.” To add to the differing viewpoint, Smith-Rosenberg argues that by the time they reach adulthood, girls often struggle with abandonment and dependency issues, not having a fully formed sense of self. As they are discouraged from asserting mastery, strength, and skill, they struggle with a lack of ego development. Smith-Rosenberg argues that women of Freud’s time, as well as today, are expected to fulfill a set of strict and contradicting ideals— defining womanhood in two terms: the True Woman and the Ideal Mother. The True Woman was submissive, passive, and emotional, a follower. She was the angel in the home, the epitome of purity, and a refuge for her husband who daily braved the corrupt world of the marketplace. On the other hand, the Ideal Mother was strong and efficient. She was a prolific caretaker who effectively managed the daily happenings of the household. The world of psychology arguably developed in two communities— one that lazily umbrella-termed women’s health and one that dared to uncover the societal reasoning for a diagnosis of female hysteria.
While the diagnosis of female hysteria ceases to exist in modern medicine and psychology, other forms of historical gender role sickness continue to be preserved in twentieth-century literature. No other outlet of culture is it more perfectly explained that the roles and stereotypes a culture propagates make an impact on the paths people perceive as being possibilities and the identity they ultimately construct. Many female writers, thinkers, and creatives of American history who were psychiatrically labeled, privately treated, and publicly hospitalized were not mad or “hysterical” at all, simply a product of the society they inhabited. Like Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Toni Morrison, they may have been deeply unhappy, self-destructive, economically powerless, and sexually impotent— but as women, they were supposed to be.
In Plath’s landmark novel The Bell Jar, Esther’s, the novel’s protagonist, struggles are rooted in her inability to become an active player in life. Though she is smart, talented, and gifted, she constantly takes on the character of the outsider and the observer. Similar to her character, Sylvia Plath lived a claustrophobic, tragic life. Highly talented in poetry and literature, Plath attended Smith College and later Cambridge University in the United Kingdom where she would meet her husband Ted Hughes. Nevertheless, Plath suffered from depression consistently from childhood and often confided in her friends about previous attempts on her life. After a miscarriage in her second pregnancy, Ted’s affair, and a divorce shortly thereafter in which Ted left her with no income and two kids to raise, Plath fell into a six-month depressive episode. On February 11th, 1963, at 30 years old, she was found dead in her house after inhaling gas from her oven. Over 50 years after her death, Sylvia Plath stands as not only an American literary figure but as a symbol of female rage and the ongoing stereotype of a “mad woman.”
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye tells the story of a young black girl named Pecola and her struggles in her image trying to fit into the American white beauty standard in a Jim Crow-era country. To cope with her insecurities and struggles, Pecola hallucinates and daydreams about a world where her beauty meets that of the girls she so envies. Throughout her hallucinations, she not only sees that her black eyes have turned blue but also acquires an imaginary friend, the only friend she believes is not jealous of her blue eyes. As we follow young Pecola on her story arc, it’s not hard to see that she gains some sense of belonging from surrounding herself with society’s other outcasts and undesirables. In fact, Morrison creates four main types of women for Pecola to look up to— existing in the form of the sexually repressed, the church women, the blues singers, and the prostitutes. It is through the women that American society has cast aside that Pecola finds her only sense of relief from the cruel, cold world she knows. To the point of Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s theory of social suppression— in endeavoring to meet these impossible, unrealistic, and conflicting ideals, Esther and Pecola were silenced, isolated, and stamped with the label of “hysterical.”
Today, the connotations surrounding the use of “hysterical” more often than not pertain to a menstrual cycle and the rise of right-wing “incel” culture in the American social sphere. According to a study conducted by the National Institute of Health in 2023, 58% of women are ashamed of having a period, and 51% of men believe that it is improper to discuss periods at work. Because of this uneducated tradition, stigma, and taboo often rooted in the myth of the “mad woman” or the “menstruating wench,” women are reluctant to talk about their periods. Menstrual stigma also has lasting implications— resulting in the reinforcement of misogynist stereotypes, with menstruators being perceived as “irrational,” “too emotional,” and “hysterical”—and as a result, less capable, which influences participation in public life and academic opportunities. As recalled in a 2014 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization report, one in every ten menstruating adolescents miss or skip school during their menstrual cycle due to insufficient accessibility to menstrual products and resources. As a result, young people often develop general anxiety disorders, social isolation behaviors, and depression because of the fear of being mocked or taunted about menstruation.
Behaviors unapologetically expressed by former president Donald Trump have resulted in further hardship for young girls on top of already established stigma. On a campaign stop in the 2016 Republican primary, Trump called veteran FOX journalist and lawyer Megyn Kelly hysterical while simultaneously referring to her reproductive system in the process, “blood coming out of her eyes, with blood coming out of her wherever.” Ever since Kelly dared to ask the presidential candidate questions about his policy, Trump has referred to her as simply “Crazy Megyn,” a name he easily bestows upon any woman who attempts to call him out on his behavior. The "Crazy Megyn" taunts registered to many American voters as some as fourth-grade bullying. But questioning a woman's sanity is a 4,000-year-old form of abuse, usedto repress women for behavior that men deemed objectionable, and therefore hysterical. In the 21st century, manifestations of the term are subtle and accepted as normal: men call female partners “hysterical," male bosses wonder if female employees possess the mental endurance to carry out tasks, and male politicians dub the women journalists who challenge them "crazy."
For the many systemic issues that plague our healthcare system and society as a whole, a lack of solutions is not one of them. From teaching the real history behind where women’s medicine comes from and the systemically oppressive roots of our medical practices to working to dismantle such preconceived, often subconscious, notions of women “overreacting” or “being dramatic” in worrying about their bodily functions. In a time of great social growth, normalizing women’s mental health, menstrual tendencies, and sexual health is a given. This can most efficiently be done by installing such topics into sexual health curriculums in America’s schools so that a whole new generation can dismantle the myth of female madness in and out of medical settings.
In abstract, the myth of female hysteria misogyny, and racism in the foundation of women’s medicine stems from a societal disregard for the cares and needs of women. The diagnosis, over its 2000-year history, was used to cover everything from premenstrual syndrome to depression to homosexuality to simple sexual desire. At its core, female madness has been scapegoated to swerve the blame of society’s misdoings and deepest cracks. When women are monolithically reduced to that of their ills, there is little room for liberation on a universal level.