Women's Mental Health and Psychology as the "Sexist Science"- Group IV pt.2
In the Victorian Era, women’s mental health was often overlooked, as the standards for women during this time were held at an all high level. Many women were driven to illness by the lifestyles pushed upon them in a form of oppression and societal expectations. With the need to be mothers, wives, caretakers and homemakers, the stress on women during this time also led to the idea that women were more susceptible to disease and mental illness. This was the basis for the diagnosis of insanity in many female patients in mental hospitals and insane asylums in the 19th century. It was common for women to be diagnosed with hysteria, depression and anxiety, on the basis of Victorian gender norms and expectations that women had to live by. Another issue was psychiatry being deemed a “sexist science” and contributing to women being issued into mental hospitals simply for rebelling against male desires or wishes.
While psychology is now one of the most important fields we study, it wasn’t until the late 1870s that it was recognized as a study separate from philosophy; it was only during the mid-1800s that we even began to consider the relationship between the health of the mind and the physiology of the body and that the two were interconnected. Hysteria was a large motivating factor behind the study of psychology and heavily influenced the research of Sigmund Freud and other prominent figures that were beginning to investigate the mind as it relates to external forces. Women were viewed as more prone towards psychiatric abnormalities due to their “weaker” composition and because of this, diagnosis of hysteria was far more common in women than in men. Before it was recognized as a distinct field of study, these ideas were still being explored, naturally particularly by women that had passionate opinions on the standards of gender roles.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a form of study on the psychology of middle-class women and a time capsule of the habits of the English upper classes. Forced into monotony by the necessity to rely on husbands often had a negative impact on the mental health of higher society women who felt an extreme pressure to conform to the female identity. Depression and anxiety ran rampant among them as their lives centered on maintaining their reputation of being pleasing to a man as suitable wives, mothers, and homemakers while men also controlled most aspects of their outside life. Things of “feminine” quality, such as novels (the idea of novels being feminine foolishness is proliferated in both Northanger Abbey and Jane Eyre), were to men, according to John Thorpe in chapter 7, “full of nonsense… they are the stupidest things in creation.” Women in general were believed to be more “stupid” than men. Women were to be paraded around and chatted with about easy niceties because they were believed to fall outside the realm of reason and logic. Women as homemakers were believed to be separate from the corrupt outside world and because of this, were seen as more delicate, emotional, and sensitive. This led to a disproportionate diagnosis of insanity and hysteria in women. As noted in The Atlantic article, “How Victorian Women were Oppressed Through the Use of Psychiatry,” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg says the psychiatrists of the 1800s “‘all had very definite ideas about how women ought to behave. There were general feelings of what caused abnormal behavior, and usually this was a refusal of traditional gender roles.’”
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is also a great example of the consequences of breaking gender roles. In the first few chapters, Jane is villainized by her foster family for her more “masculine” energy of fighting back. Immediately, they make references to her as animalistic in her behavior and make references towards sanity. Bessie in chapter 2 says Jane's "mad like a cat” while trying to subdue the upset child. Jane is ultimately sent away to a home, much in the way women that were viewed as “abnormal” in their behavior were often sent away to asylums. Women were disproportionately affected by this largely in part due to their lack of autonomy. In many states, husbands could send their wives away without showing proof of insanity. Women that were “fallen,” or had "given in” to the sin of sex outside of marriage, were also disproportionate victims of these asylums as these institutions were viewed, as noted in “The Hysterical Female,” “as a way to save these women, restore their respectability, and prepare them for a return to society in an acceptable female role.”
Bibliography:
Restoring Perspective: Life & Treatment at London's Asylum, www.lib.uwo.ca/archives/virtualexhibits/londonasylum/hysteria.html.
“How Victorian Women Were Oppressed Through the Use of Psychiatry.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/netflix-2017/how-victorian-women-were-oppressed-through-the-use-of-psychiatry/1607/.
Fauvel, Aude. “Crazy Brains and the Weaker Sex: the British Case (1860-1900).” Clio. Women, Gender, History, Belin, 15 Apr. 2014, journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/352.
Wallace, Wendy. “Sent to the Asylum: The Victorian Women Locked up Because They Were Suffering from Stress, Post Natal Depression and Anxiety.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 16 May 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2141741/Sent-asylum-The-Victorian-w....
Bertha Mason's Madness in a Contemporary Context, www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/iwama8.html.
Additional Links
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2464&context=honorstheses