I'd like to draw the analogy to hysteria, white female hysteria in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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For "A Strange Relative," Belanger and Smith were thinking about the idea of female hysteria, a dated but persistent cultural diagnosis.
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And then there's "Sad Girls Club," which Pyle says is, at least in part, an attempt to address the long historicization of female hysteria.
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Do you think the concept of "female hysteria" is more relevant than ever now, even though it is an incredibly dated term and mentality?
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"Female hysteria" is another iteration of this that, like other poorly researched or thought out practices, trickled down the historical timeline and stayed part of belief systems.
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In the Victorian era, it was that one guy at the dinner party who was always jokingly diagnosing you with "female hysteria" every time you expressed an opinion.
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After the birth of their child, he diagnoses her with "female hysteria," confining her to a bedroom with instructions to only concern herself with domestic life as a cure.
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Well, okay, it may have originally been created to treat the sexist and absurd notion of "female hysteria," but, thankfully, women have taken back the vibrator from Victorian-era male doctors.
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It also plays into those themes of Black female hysteria and people not believing Black women or people of color when we say that we're in danger, or that something is violent to us.
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The trope of female hysteria might seem like a hang-up from different times, but it still pervades our cultural landscape — and often resists reinvention, as a string of new theater productions suggest in Paris.
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" Perhaps in response to stereotypes about female hysteria — Seresin mentions the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme — Clein and other women she's observed "instead now seem to be interiorizing our existential aches and angst, smirking knowingly at them, and numbing ourselves to maintain our nonchalance.
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Early skepticism about Dark Phoenix, even in 280 characters, gets at the very real concern that the film will instead simply gloss over these issues, chalking them up as female hysteria and delivering a very dangerous warning about repressing a woman's power and voice.
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The curtain opens on a woman's legs and red heels dangling from a car door; they belong to the award-winning actress Emmanuelle Devos, who brilliantly skirts around stereotypical representations of female hysteria as Andrea, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
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Whose take will hold more appeal depends on the reader's interests: In "Buzz," Hallie Lieberman offers a broader view, taking us back some 30,000 years, when our ancestors carved penises out of siltstone; moving on to the ancient Greeks' creative use of olive oil; the buzzy medical devices of the 19th century (disappointingly, doctors' notorious in-office use of vibrators as treatment for female "hysteria" is urban legend); and the impact of early-20th-century obscenity laws — incredibly, sex toys remain illegal in Alabama — before digging deeply into more contemporary influences.
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Dr Maudsley arrives to lecture about female hysteria, his own opinion being that women have inferior moral strength caused by a weaker mind and will. As he lectures he repeatedly ignores the female students until Tess can bear no more and challenges him. Maudsley takes this as evidence of female hysteria and demands that she leave the lecture. She rushes out into the street.
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Today, female hysteria is no longer a recognized illness, but different manifestations of hysteria are recognized in other conditions such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, conversion disorder, and anxiety attacks.
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Retention was believed to cause female hysteria. In ancient Greek religion as a whole, semen is considered a form of miasma, and ritual purification was to be practised after its discharge.Parker, Robert. 1996. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion.
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Symptoms of the female hysteria diagnosis – a concept that is no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder – included faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a propensity for causing trouble. It may be that women who were considered suffering from female hysteria condition would sometimes undergo "pelvic massage" – stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the woman experienced "hysterical paroxysm" (i.e., orgasm). In this case, paroxysm was regarded as a medical treatment, and not a sexual release.
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Female sexual desire sometimes used to be diagnosed as female hysteria. Sensitivities to foods and food allergies risk being misdiagnosed as the anxiety disorder Orthorexia. Studies have found that bipolar disorder has often been misdiagnosed as major depression. Its early diagnosis necessitates that clinicians pay attention to the features of the patient's depression and also look for present or prior hypomanic or manic symptomatology.
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Her tale is likely to have resonated with many women because female hysteria was a common medical diagnosis at the time, having arisen many centuries earlier as the first mental disorder attributed to specifically women. Hysterical neurosis was not removed from the DSM until 1980, whereas postpartum depression continues to be excluded as a unique "distinct disorder" and was only added into the fourth edition as a "course modified" in 1994. Thus, in the 19th century, the idea of female hysteria was often conflated and confused with symptoms of postpartum depression, all in connection with the prevailing mindset that women were weak and vulnerable to mental illness. Also during the 19th century, gynecologists embraced the idea that female reproductive organs, and the natural processes they were involved in, were at fault for "female insanity." Approximately 10% of asylum admissions during this time period are connected to “puerperal insanity,” the named intersection between pregnancy or childbirth and female mental illness.
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A type of massage that is done in an erotic way via the use of massage techniques by a person on another person's erogenous zones to achieve or enhance their sexual excitation or arousal and to achieve orgasm. It was also once used for medical purposes as well as for the treatment of "female hysteria" and "womb disease".Pieter van Foreest (1631). Observationem et Curationem Medicinalium ac Chirurgicarum Opera Omnia, medical compendium.
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The number of French psychiatric theses on hysteria During the early 20th century, the number of women diagnosed with female hysteria sharply declined. This decline has been attributed to many factors. Some medical authors claim that the decline was due to gaining a greater understanding of the psychology behind conversion disorders such as hysteria. With so many possible symptoms, historically hysteria was considered a catchall diagnosis where any unidentifiable ailment could be assigned.
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The popularity of such proposed causes decreased during the 20th century. In the early 20th century, American neurosurgeon Harvey Williams Cushing increased the acceptance of surgical treatments for low back pain. In the 1920s and 1930s, new theories of the cause arose, with physicians proposing a combination of nervous system and psychological disorders such as nerve weakness (neurasthenia) and female hysteria. Muscular rheumatism (now called fibromyalgia) was also cited with increasing frequency.
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She had originally set out to rewrite a version of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, which is a courtroom thriller about a middle-class family accused of kidnapping a young girl.McCrum, Robert (10 May 2009). "What Lies Beneath: Ghosts, Gothic horror, lesbians, poltergeists, female hysteria... There are hidden depths to Sarah Waters...", The Observer (England), p. 20. Waters is well known for the immense amount of research she completes for her novels.
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Cruger was born in Oscawana in Westchester County, New York, the daughter of Captain Nicholas Cruger (1801-1868) and Eliza Kortright Cruger. After the deaths of her parents, she built a house near Montrose, New York called "Wood Rest". Cruger's first novel, Hyperaesthesia (1886), was about several people at a New York resort suffering from the title malady, a condition of abnormal sensitivity. Cruger's novel examines female hysteria in a way that presages the work of later historians.
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Tammy Blanchard and Jessica Lange in Sybil Troubled Columbia University art student and later student teacher Sybil Dorsett is referred to psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur by Dr. Atcheson, a colleague who believes that the young woman is suffering from female hysteria. As her treatment progresses, Sybil confesses that she frequently experiences blackouts and cannot account for large blocks of time. Wilbur helps her recall a childhood in which she suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of her disturbed mother Hattie. Eventually, 16 identities varying in age and personal traits begin to emerge.
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Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis for women, which 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, (paradoxically) sexually forward behaviour, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others". 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. In Western medicine hysteria was considered both common and chronic among women.
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In archaic usage, the vapours (or vapors) is a reference to certain mental or physical states, such as hysteria, mania, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, lightheadedness, fainting, flush, withdrawal syndrome, mood swings, or PMS, where a sufferer lost mental focus. Ascribed primarily to women and thought to be caused by internal emanations (vapours) from the womb, it was related to the concept of female hysteria. The word "vapours" was subsequently used to describe a depressed or hysterical nervous condition. Over 4000 years of history, this disease was considered from two perspectives: scientific and demonological.
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They found that using this metric they could distinguish from rest, voluntary muscular contractions, and even unsuccessful orgasm attempts. Since ancient times in Western Europe, women could be medically diagnosed with a disorder called female hysteria, the symptoms of which included faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and "a tendency to cause trouble". Women considered suffering from the condition would sometimes undergo "pelvic massage" — stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the woman experienced "hysterical paroxysm" (i.e., orgasm).
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French pelvic douche, circa 1860. According to Rachel P. Maines, in the Western medical tradition, genital massage of a woman to orgasm by a physician or midwife was a standard treatment for female hysteria, an ailment considered common and chronic in women. In 1653, Pieter van ForeestIn a medical compendium titled Observationem et Curationem Medicinalium ac Chirurgicarum Opera Omnia advised the technique of genital massage for a disease called "womb disease" to bring the woman into "hysterical paroxysm". Such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death but needed constant treatment.
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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. George Beard, a physician who cataloged an incomplete list including 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria, 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. One American physician expressed pleasure in the fact that the country was "catching up" to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.
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This is the first room encountered on the left of the main entrance. There are Pharmacist’s cupboards displaying original bottles, tablets, injections, and doctor’s prescriptions. Items include a bullet extractor and a spring-loaded device for physiotherapy of muscles in the hand (where each finger's movement—of a hand that is closing—is counteracted by the force of separate springs, as the springs are stretched). Among other exhibits are a phallic item believed to have been used in the treatment of female hysteria in ancient times, and a rare find: oil from the Larnaka salt lake which was used in skin wounds and insect bites.
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Dr. Givings, an electrical scientist, lives with his wife, Catherine, and their newborn, Letitia, in upstate New York during the late 19th-century. With the recent innovation of electricity entering American homes, Givings harnesses it to create a machine designed to cure female hysteria by inducing "paroxysms" - innocently giving birth to the vibrator. He treats his patients in an operating theater within his house, the eponymous "next room," alongside his assistant and midwife, Annie. While he believes his wife to be physically strained from an excess of milk that is insufficient to feed their child, Catherine is sexually dissatisfied with her husband, who is fascinated by electricity and struggles with intimacy.
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Male "traumatic hysteria", as defined by Charcot, was a distinct disease from female hysteria in that it was linked to traumatic shock rather than sexuality or emotional distress, so the gendered stereotyping was still at work to an extent in Charcot's thinking. This new category subsumed what British and American physicians had understood as railway spine. From Paris, Charcot's theories traveled east, carried by visitors to Charcot's hospital: the Germans Max Nonne and Hermann Oppenheim, and the Austrian Sigmund Freud. Nonne was originally skeptical, but ultimately became a proponent of the male hysteria diagnosis when dealing with the neurotics produced by the First World War.
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Wilson, in her book Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment (1993), places the convulsionnaire phenomenon within the debate over so-called maladies des femmes (women's illnesses) in 18th-century France. She argues that women figured prominently in the struggle between the emerging professional medical community and other practitioners of medicine which might be called charlatans. She points to physicians (Philippe Hecquet) and theologians (Nigon de Berty) alike who attributed the convulsions to female hysteria, sexual frustration and menstrual irregularities, as well as woman's inherent moral inferiority. Jan E. Goldstein (1998) has also commented on Hecquet's 1733 treatise on convulsions, which directly links a woman's "imagination" to her uterus and also to the convulsions.
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"What Lies Beneath: Ghosts, Gothic horror, lesbians, poltergeists, female hysteria... There are hidden depths to Sarah Waters...", The Observer (England), p. 20. In 1995, Waters was at Queen Mary and Westfield College writing her PhD dissertation on gay and lesbian historical fiction from 1870 onward when she became interested in the Victorian era. While learning about the activism in socialism, women's suffrage, and utopianism of the period, she was inspired to write a work of fiction of the kind that she would like to read. Specifically, Waters intended to write a story that focused on an urban setting, diverging from previous lesbian-themed books such as Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah, in which two women escape an oppressive home life to live together freely in the woods.
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The release of fluids had been seen by medical practitioners as beneficial to health. Within this context, various methods were used over the centuries to release "female seed" (via vaginal lubrication or female ejaculation) as a treatment for suffocation ex semine retento (suffocation of the womb), female hysteria or green sickness. Methods included a midwife rubbing the walls of the vagina or insertion of the penis or penis-shaped objects into the vagina. In the book History of V, Catherine Blackledge lists old terms for what she believes refer to the female prostate (the Skene's gland), including the little stream, the black pearl and palace of yin in China, the skin of the earthworm in Japan, and saspanda nadi in the India sex manual Ananga Ranga.
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Toward the end of the century, female hysteria became increasingly an anti-suffragist label in the popular press and came under attack from rising feminism, while the wars of the early twentieth century brought new attention to the male variant. The Boer War and the Russo- Japanese War produced hysterical symptoms in veterans in large enough numbers that in 1907 the label "war neurosis" was introduced to describe their specific condition. For the disorders seen in World War I veterans, additional terms such as shell-shock (coined by Charles Samuel Myers), and (in France) pthiatiques and simulateurs were invented to prevent labeling soldiers with the "feminizing" label of hysteria. Charcot's earlier work, meanwhile, was ignored, and shell-shock sufferers were regarded by their physicians as displaying the symptoms of "womanish, homosexual or childish impulses".
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In the late 1880s Granville invented the electric vibrator, a handheld electric operated device designed to relieve more muscle aches and pains. Originally called a percusser or more colloquially "Granville's hammer", the machine was manufactured and sold to physicians, many of whom used the equipment to create "hysterical paroxysm" in their patients with female hysteria. As vibrators began to be used for bringing hysterical women to paroxysm, its inventor tried to disassociate himself from the device's "mis-use". In his 1883 book on his research, Nerve- Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease, he wrote, "I have never yet percussed a female patient ... I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state ..."Granville, J. M. (1883) Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease.
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Regarding religion, the vagina represents a powerful symbol as the yoni in Hinduism, and this may indicate the value that Hindu society has given female sexuality and the vagina's ability to deliver life. While, in ancient times, the vagina was often considered equivalent (homologous) to the penis, with anatomists Galen (129 AD – 200 AD) and Vesalius (1514–1564) regarding the organs as structurally the same except for the vagina being inverted, anatomical studies over latter centuries showed the clitoris to be the penile equivalent. Another perception of the vagina was that the release of vaginal fluids would cure or remedy a number of ailments; various methods were used over the centuries to release "female seed" (via vaginal lubrication or female ejaculation) as a treatment for (suffocation of the womb, 'suffocation from retained seed'), green sickness, and possibly for female hysteria. Reported methods for treatment included a midwife rubbing the walls of the vagina or insertion of the penis or penis-shaped objects into the vagina.
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