As Richard Blackmore’s writings show, women were seen to be more susceptible to life’s problems and setbacks, and likely to react in a more visceral and extreme way.

The archetypal hysterical patient was often depicted as young and female. Hysteria had a longstanding and close association with women, deriving its name from the Greek word for the womb – hystera. Richard Blackmore wrote in 1726, that hysteria and hypochondria were the same ‘malady’, but that ‘it is true that the convulsive disorders and agitations in the various parts of the body, as well as the confusion and dissipation of the animal spirits, are more conspicuous and violent in the female sex, than in men the reason of which is, a more volatile, dissipable, and weak constitution of the spirits, and a more soft, tender, and delicate texture of the nerves (among women) but this proves no differerence in their nature and essential properties, but only a higher or lower degree of the symptoms common to both.’(Richard Blackmore – A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections (1726). It can be argued that women were perceived as mentally different during this period, including a belief that they were more prone to extreme manifestations of mental illness symptoms. The historical study of mania and hysteria between 17 has tended to fit with this gendered reading of diagnosis. The asylum was reimagined as a tool of patriarchal oppression by many researchers. Other feminist historians followed these pioneering works, and argued that historically women were more likely to be labelled as mad. Madness, once seen as elemental and physically brutish, was reimagined as a loss of an individual’s reason, which fitted the societal image of the vulnerable and irrational female. Elaine Showalter built upon this work, arguing in The Female Malady (1987) that the archetype of madness shifted from a violent and brutish male patient in the 1700s, to a female one in the 1800s. She also claimed that this was much less often the case in male patients. Chesler was a psychiatric practitioner, who took historical examples and also drew on her own experiences as a doctor to portray a patriarchal psychiatric profession which was keen to diagnose women as mad if they deviated from socially accepted norms. This historical analysis began with the 1960s wave of feminist writing, and first bore fruit with Phyllis Chesler’s 1972 work Women and Madness. The study of women’s cultural association with madness and how likely women were to be admitted to asylums has dominated much of the discourse concerning gender and madness in recent times. Historians of the last forty years have examined female mental illness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more than any previous generation of academics.

Chesler women and madness