Hearing women as mad in the asylum: past perceptions haunting the present

From the claim a woman sounds ‘hysterical’ to having their opinions met with the colloquialism ‘mad cow’, women are frequently heard as mad. Men are heard as mad too, but they are not called ‘mad bulls’ or ‘hysterical men’. All too readily, and seemingly uncritically, women are linked with madness in everyday culture. Hysterical comes from the word hysteria, meaning ‘of the womb’, deriving first from classical Greek and then Latin. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the heyday of hysteria: one in which this old-fashioned medicalised term for madness could be coupled with a new, cutting-edge surgical cure in the form of a hysterectomy that removed a woman’s uterus. The historical belief that a woman’s physical body—her womb—could cause madness was still prevalent. Hysteria only ceased to be part of the medical lexicon in the 1950s. Yet historical medical and cultural beliefs, some spanning thousands of years, still underpin the conscious and unconscious cultural uses of these terms today. Women are still being heard as transgressing institutional power structures, and being labelled as mad as a result. Why are women so readily heard as mad today, and in the past? In the asylum, how and why did medical men interpret what they thought they heard as mad? Historical analysis of the practices of hearing women’s madness in the asylum reveals much about why these antiquated perceptions linger into our present