The 10 Reasons Men Put Women In Asylums Are Still Too Familiar
We don’t lock women up now, but the reasons we did still echo through time
In a shadowy corner of the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Illinois, a woman stared out the bars of the tiny window. Three years she’d been in there.
Listening to women cry and beg to go home.
Her baby would be walking now. Wouldn’t know her anymore.
When the men burst into her house, picked her up fighting and screaming, she thought her husband was teaching her a lesson for arguing. Stay a few days, he’d bring her back home, she thought. But when the trunk of her clothing arrived she knew. She was there to stay. It’s a true story.
All it took to commit a woman to an asylum was the signature of two doctors — or one man if he was her husband, father or brother.
The West Virginia Division of Culture & History has a list of 125 reasons women were put in asylums starting in 1840. Behaviors men didn’t like. And it went on right into the 1950s. We don’t lock women up like we used to. But if you look at the reasons?
They still sound way too familiar.
1. Diagnosis: Hysteria
What it meant: You’re a woman, so your uterus is making you crazy.
Not even kidding. The word hysteria comes from hystera, the Greek word for uterus. According to the National Library of Medicine, the entire field of psychiatry was created to treat women who were acting crazy.
Hippocrates said having a uterus can make women crazy. The same man who wrote the Hippocratic oath about doctors doing no harm. Only women go crazy, he said. Crying, arguing, not following orders, yelling, or getting way too emotional — those were all caused by the uterus, he said.
Anything a woman did that men didn’t like was called hysteria. She was acting that way because she has a uterus, simple as that.
Today we just get called crazy. Followed by the b-word. Crazy is the slur that just won’t go away.
2. Diagnosis: Melancholia
What it meant: She won’t cheer up. Women should be sweet and cheerful.
Sometimes it was depression. Other times? She was just miserable. Often, even grieving the loss of a parent, sibling or a child. One woman identified as Margaret W. was diagnosed with melancholia and put in an asylum two weeks after being deserted by her husband. Two weeks!
There’s a limit for how long men would tolerate a woman moping. And it was real short. You can have another child for heaven’s sakes, or find another man. Women are supposed to be sweet and cheerful.
Today’s version is smile honey. You should smile more.
3. Diagnosis: Moral Insanity
What it meant: Anything women did that men found horrifying.
The term was coined by James Prichard in 1835. Lots of things were considered morally insane. Not wanting kids, smoking, cheating on your husband or preferring woman to men, being interested in politics or “male” interests, refusing to get married — or reading books.
There was an acceptable way to act if you were a woman and if you deviated from that, you risked being put away for moral insanity.
Time Magazine tells the story of a doctor who visited a girls’ school in 1858, told the teacher “You seem to be training your girls for the lunatic asylum.”
We still have ideas about how women “should” behave. Ask any woman who isn’t husband hunting or doesn’t want kids what people say to her.
4. Diagnosis: Puerperal Insanity
What it meant: You had a kid, and childbirth made you crazy.
Puerperal is a medical term for the six week period after childbirth. Doctors and obstetricians believed childbirth could cause insanity.
And yes, some women diagnosed with Puerperal insanity had post-partum depression. But a lot had fever delirium because of infection, or breast infection. They needed medical help they never got. Often they died. Doctors concluded that “puerperal insanity” was often fatal.
But also? Sometimes years passed before she got locked up for puerperal insanity. Husband says she’s never been the same since having kids, she’s just not a good wife anymore. Doctor nodded in sympathy.
Today, employers think that way. Ask women if they have kids, but don’t ask men the same thing. Tsk, tsk, she’s just not the same once she has kids.
5. Diagnosis: Nymphomania
What it meant: She’s cheating or she’s promiscuous or gawd, she’s both.
A woman was supposed to have more delicate “appetites” than men, if you get what I’m saying. Not seek them out and initiate, for goodness sakes.
It started with the medical study, Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus, written 1775. Any woman had a bigger appetite that her man, she’s a problem. She’s cheating? Asylum. Promiscuous? Asylum.
Now we just call them ho’s and other nasty slurs.
6. Diagnosis: Neurasthenia
What it meant: She’s got weak nerves, and she’s not coping very well
Neurasthenia comes from the Ancient Greek neuron meaning “nerve” and asthenés, meaning “weak.” Weak nerves. It meant she’s not coping well. Another gift from the Ancient Greeks to go along with hysteria.
Sometimes, weak nerves came from trauma. Virginia Woolf had a forced “rest cure” when she learned her step-brother was assaulting her sister, too not just her. Doctors noted that bruises were a symptom of neurasthenia
It was also the diagnosis for exhaustion. Many of the women diagnosed with neurasthenia had six to ten kids, one right after the other and no modern appliances to help reduce the load of work they did daily.
We’re still exhausted, we just don’t get locked up for it now.
7. Diagnosis: Religious Monomania
What it meant: You don’t agree with his religious beliefs so you’re crazy
That’s what Elizabeth Packard was diagnosed with when her husband had radical beliefs that included punishing children for being heathens. She didn’t agree so she went to a different church. He committed her.
The reasons were all over the place. She wanted to go to church more often than he did, or she didn’t go often enough. She was too pious or not pious enough. Her religious beliefs were supposed to be the same as his.
I think this one bled into politics, if you know what I mean.
8. Diagnosis: Heredity Insanity
What it meant: Someone in her family was nuts, so she is, too.
Heredity was the diagnosis of any woman with an insane family member. All her husband had to say is her mother or some other family member was crazy, that’s all it took. Didn’t matter if her symptoms pointed to some other diagnosis, heredity meant the asylum door was slamming shut.
Not touching the in-laws topic, or how this plays out for some folks.
9. Diagnosis: Menopausal Insanity
What it meant: He’s sick of her or has a younger replacement in mind.
In 1893, Hannah, a fifty year old housewife was brought to an asylum. Her notes said she wouldn’t stop complaining about “supposed” ailments.
She had hot flashes. And dry mouth, which can happen when estrogen drops. About 11% of women admitted were menopausal insanity. The kids had all grown up by then, why listen to her complaining every day?
Charles Dickens once toured an asylum, called it a “foul, wretched place” and then years later, tried to commit his wife when she hit menopause. Had nothing to do with his affair with an 18 year old actress at all.
Today women hit a certain age, they just become invisible to society.
10. Diagnosis: Insanity, Unspecified
What it meant: You’re crazy. Doesn’t matter why. Because he said so.
When all else fails, unspecified insanity would do. Because a reason was just a courtesy. Starting in 1840, the US census attempted to catalog the insane but there were so many reasons, no reason was just as good.
Because really, it came down to one thing. Women didn’t have legal rights so if a man said she’s crazy, well then she’s crazy. Simple as that.
Today? Can’t lock us up now but women still get called crazy.
Think this happened long ago? Think again…
We think this all happened a long time ago but hysteria wasn’t removed from the DSM until 1980. Things got worse for women before they got better.
In the 1930s, a Portuguese neurologist invented the lobotomy. Then an American psychiatrist, Dr. Walter Freeman, invented a simplified lobotomy that could be done right in the asylum. No expensive surgeon needed.
He said it would liberate mental health patients from lifelong institution.
In America, about 50,000 people got lobotomies. 75% were women. Only took the husband or father’s consent. She’s acting crazy.
Rosie Kennedy was given a lobotomy in 1941 for being promiscuous. Her dad was afraid her behavior would be splashed all over the news, ruin her brother’s chances of becoming president so he gave consent.
The last lobotomy was in 1967, phased out in favor of new antipsychotic meds available. Men could put their wives on Valium. Valium wives were real. And if she didn’t want it? Too bad, your husband or doctor said so.
Doctors had the legal right to give meds without a woman’s consent.
Sometimes, they’d hold them down while patients screamed. Again, mostly women. That changed because Eleanor Riese took it to court and won.
She stood in that court room twitching involuntarily and told the judge she knows she looks like a crazy woman, but the twitching is a side effects of the medications injected into her without her permission.
And she won the case. The judge said this will not happen anymore.
That was in 1985. Only forty years ago.
We don’t lock women up or medicate them against their will today. But the reasons still echo because it was only forty years ago we stopped.
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What makes you say we don’t lock women up or medicate them against their will anymore?🫤
This is a subject very dear to my heart and I've been reading about it avidly for years. Thanks for this post. I have a theory that we're still locking women up, but in ways that don't require chains and that allow us to continue to seem to be in the world. The impulse to control and contain women is many thousands of years old and is, I think, as deeply embedded in DNA as it is in culture. Changing laws and securing rights is a vital and important move. But it alone cannot undo all of that history.