Female hysteria
Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis for women. It was described as exhibiting a wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, even sexually forward behavior, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others".[1] It is no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for hundreds of years in Western Europe.[1]
Female hysteria
In Western medicine, hysteria was considered both common and chronic among women. Even though it was categorized as a disease, hysteria's symptoms were synonymous with normal functioning female sexuality.[1] In the context of hysteria, every symptom and negative thought was linked to sex.[2] In extreme cases, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or to undergo surgical hysterectomy.[3]
18th century[edit]
In the 18th century, hysteria slowly became associated with mechanisms in the brain rather than the uterus. This is also when it was noted both men and women could contract hysteria.[15] French physician Philippe Pinel freed hysteria patients detained in Paris' Salpêtrière sanatorium on the basis that kindness and sensitivity were needed to formulate good care. Another French physician, Francois de Sauvages de La Croix believed some common signs of female hysteria were "tears and laughter, oscitation [yawning], pandiculation (stretching and yawning), suffocating angina (chest pain) or dyspnea (shortness of breath), dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), delirium, a close and driving pulse, a swollen abdomen, cold extremities, and abundant and clear urine."[15]
Anton Mesmer, a German physician, came up with the theory of “animal magnetism”, later referred to as mesmerism. Mesmer saw “animal magnetism” as energy that flowed through the nervous system. He would try to manipulate that “energy” to relieve his patients of hysteria. One of the methods he used was having his patients hold onto metal rods that were electrically charged. Mesmer’s findings on "animal magnetism" were later discredited.[16]
19th century[edit]
Jean-Martin Charcot argued that hysteria derived from a neurological disorder and showed that it was more common in men than women.[4] Charcot's theories of hysteria being a physical condition of the mind and not of the body led to a more scientific and analytical approach to hysteria in the 19th century. He dispelled the beliefs that hysteria had anything to do with the supernatural and attempted to define it medically.[17] Charcot's use of photography,[18] and the resulting concretization of women's expressions of health and distress, continued to influence women's experiences of seeking healthcare.[19] Though older ideas persisted during this era, over time female hysteria began to be thought of less as a physical ailment and more of a psychological one.[20]
George Beard, a physician who cataloged an incomplete list including 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria,[21] claimed that almost any ailment could fit the diagnosis. Physicians thought that the stress associated with the typical female life at the time caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts.[22] One American physician expressed pleasure in the fact that the country was "catching up" to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.[21]
In 1875, Edward Hammond Clarke wrote “Sex in Education”, a book discussing his views on men and women’s education. Clarke believed that if women were educated, the energy in their bodies would go to the brain instead of the reproductive organs, hindering childbirth. He attributed clothing, food, exercise, and education for causing “Leucorrhoea, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsis utari, hysteria, neuralgia”. Clarke believed that men came into the world fully developed, while women were not. He stated that by imposing men’s education on women, their problem would worsen. His views were condemned by many women’s organizations.[23]
According to Pierre Roussel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, femininity was a natural and essential desire for women: "Femininity is for both authors an essential nature, with defined functions, and the disease is explained by the non-fulfillment of natural desire."[4] It was during the industrial revolution and the major development of cities and modern lifestyles that disruption of this natural appetite was thought to cause lethargy or melancholy, leading to hysteria.[4] At the time female patients sought medical practitioners for the massage treatment of hysteria. The rate of hysteria was so great in the socially restrictive industrial period that women were prone to carry smelling salts about their person in case they swooned, reminiscent of Hippocrates' theory of using odors to coerce the uterus back into place. For physicians, manual massage treatment was becoming laborious and time-consuming, and they were seeking a way to increase productivity.[12]
Rachel Maines hypothesized that physicians from the classical era until the early 20th century commonly treated hysteria by manually stimulating the genitals of female patients to the point of orgasm, which was denominated "hysterical paroxysm", and that the inconvenience of this may have motivated the original development of and market for the vibrator.[1] Other hysteria treatments included pregnancy, marriage, heterosexual sex, and the application of smelling oils on female genitals.[24] Although Maines's theory that hysteria was treated by manually stimulating female patients' genitalia to orgasm is widely repeated in the literature on female anatomy and sexuality,[25] some historians dispute Maines's claims regarding the prevalence of this treatment for hysteria and its relevance to the invention of the vibrator, describing them as a distortion of the evidence or that they are only relevant to a very small group.[26][27][28] In 2018, Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg of Georgia Institute of Technology challenged Maines's claims for the use of electromechanical vibrators to treat hysteria in the 19th century.[29] Maines stated that her theory of the prevalence of masturbation for hysteria and its relevance to the invention of the vibrator is a hypothesis and not proven fact.[25]
Frederick Hollick was a firm believer that a main cause of hysteria was licentiousness present in women.[30]
20th century[edit]
In the 1910s, psychiatrist L. E. Emerson was heavily involved in treating patients of hysteria at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Emerson published case studies on his patients, who were often "young, single, native-born, and white" and either had been raped or had a lack of healthy sexual relationships.[2] One of his more famous works was a case study of a woman called "Miss A". In the study, Emerson summarized the patient's experience with sexual violence, which he said that most women with hysteria had encountered.[31] Miss A would practise self harm, and Emerson deduced that this practice was a release for the sexual assault she had previously experienced, and substituted for a form of masturbation. Another case study was of Sally Hollis, a woman who often viewed her experience with sexual assault by the terms of her own failing actions and female aggression. Believing the roots of hysteria lay in sexual conflict, Emerson paid attention to the theme of lack of sexual knowledge amongst these women, viewing them as repressed.[2] The lack of sexual knowledge ranged from not knowing what menstruation was, how conception began or what the process of giving birth was.
Some women purposefully sought out the "hysteric" diagnosis because they believed it could provide an answer to what they were experiencing. Most of the patients that Emerson saw were single because they were either young or have purposefully avoided men. Author Elizabeth Lunbeck noted that these women typically fell into three categories. They either withdrew from the heterosexual sphere entirely, despite wanting to participate; they experienced something that was sexually unwanted but would experience guilt over what happened like Sally Hollis; or they were haunted by their sexual traumas in the past.[2] As hysteria was growing into a more prominent diagnosis amongst women, it had led to the police treating any report for sexual assault or rape with skepticism, with the common belief at the time being that "sexual assault is physically impossible without consent".[2]
Relationship with women's rights and feminism[edit]
In the 1980s, feminists began to reclaim hysteria, using it as a symbol of the systematic oppression of women and reclaiming the term for themselves.[6] The idea of hysteria became an embodiment of the oppressions against women, especially among sex-positive feminists, who believe sexual repression and having it called hysteria is a form of oppression.[6] The idea stemmed from the belief that hysteria was a kind of pre-feminist rebellion against the oppressive defined social roles placed upon women. Feminist writers such as Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous wrote in The Newly Born Woman from a place of opposition to the theories proposed in psychoanalytical works. Clément, Cixous and other feminist writers pushed back against the notion that socially constructed femininities and hysteria are natural to being female.[6][17] Feminist social historians of both sexes argue that hysteria is caused by women's oppressed social roles, rather than by their bodies or psyches.[38]