Women and Madness

Chesler reaches back to pantheistic myths of abducted daughters and forward to the modern American snake pit, where thousands of women had been brutally albeit legally confined, often for nothing other than being lesbian, doubting the maternal mission, or experiencing a hellish menopause. No one before had so methodically undone the hooks and straps of women’s psychosocial bind, or analyzed the therapeutic orthodoxies by which marriage and motherhood “were revived as salvation myths for twentieth-century women.” Docked a star and a half for a conception of male homosexuality just as backward and destructive as Freud’s (worse in a way, since Chesler lacked the Victorian age as an excuse).

The author explores perception of women and gender roles, making a case that "madness" can be a normal response to intolerable pressures and exploitations experienced by women. Issues in the myth of Demeter and Persephone are explored. As an introduction to the topic, Chesler cites writings of and by four women who were institutionalized as psychiatric patients: Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ellen West and Elizabeth Ware Packard.
I was particularly interested in the perspectives on E.W. Packard, since she was one of my great-great-great grandmothers. in the 1860's, Packard was committed on the say-so of her minister husband, purely because of her progressive views on religion. She spent three agonizing years in the Illinois state show more mental hospital, and subsequently wrote about her experiences. She later became an activist, urging state and federal legislators to change laws that permitted men to commit their wives to institutions virtually at will. She argued persuasively for basic rights for mental patients. Her story is compared with those of Plath, Fitzgerald, and West in the first chapter.
Chesler goes on to look at attitudes of therapists of both sexes toward women. She discussed the nature of asylums, and the therapeutic relationship between clinician and patient.
Chesler conducted 60 interviews with women who had been in treatment for mental illness. She categorized the interviewees as women who had been sexually involved with their therapists, those who had spent time in psychiatric hospitals, those who identified themselves as lesbians, those who thought of themselves as feminists, and "third world women" who came from a background of poverty. Some women were listed in more than one category. The experiences of the women are compared and analyzed.
Women and Madness was a little hard to get through, but ultimately worth reading. The author thinks of herself as more of an artist than a scientist, and tends to rant and ramble around her topic. She is passionate about pointing out the injustices endured by women in modern society, and gender inequities in psychiatric care. show less

ref. by bitch mag

Reviewed here.