Joseph Mortimer Granville created the vibrator as a medical tool to cure hysteria by inducing "hysterical paroxysm" (or an orgasm), the thought went, a hysterical woman would be cured of her instability. His rest cure was designed to reduce the woman to infancy, and to “make the will of the male her own.” (It didn't work: Gilman went on to write The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the seminal texts in early feminist literature, which detailed the dangers of the “rest cure.”) In the 1880s, Dr.
Mitchell didn't necessarily enjoy treating the hysterical patients, especially the “women with long memories, who question much where answers are difficult, and who put together one’s answers from time to time,” as Showalter points out. “Live as domestic a life as possible” and “never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live,” was Mitchell’s medical advice, as recorded by Gilman. Nurses would clean and feed their patients, some of whom were forbidden to speak, read, write, or sew. Silas Weir Mitchell that relied on bed rest and a diet of fatty, milk-based foods (if refused, they would be force-fed). Women were subjected to the “rest cure,” a popular treatment for hysteria developed by Dr. The 19th-century writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an example of a woman diagnosed and sentenced to the peaceful “rest” that Wright suggested. But desire for equality was their sickness, according to Wright, and their “self-esteem” was the “poison.” But not to worry Wright assured that peace was still possible, assuming all these women would just go away and seek “‘rest’ beyond the sea, ‘each one in the house of her husband. Wright who claimed that “there is mixed up with the woman's movement much mental disorder.” Their deviant desires? As detailed by Wright in his letter to the London Times editor, these women wanted to live in a world where “man and woman shall everywhere work side by side at the selfsame tasks and for the selfsame pay.” They wanted to be recognized for their value outside of motherhood and marriage. Showalter points to a comment from the London Times that argues suffragists were clearly “suffering from hysteria,” and another article called “On Militant Hysteria” written by the celebrated physician Sir A.E. The hysterical woman became a familiar caricature that was frequently mocked in the press. “During an era when patriarchal culture felt itself to be under attack by its rebellious daughters, one obvious defense was to label women campaigning for access to the university, the professions, and the vote as mentally disturbed,” writes now retired Princeton University professor Elaine Showalter wrote in an essay called “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender.” Showalter argues that the terms hysteria and hysterical became entrenched “in the rhetoric of anti-suffragists who sought to discredit the feminist movement.
By the late 1800s, almost anything could mark a woman as a hysteric, but one symptom was particularly damning: belonging to the burgeoning feminist movement. In the 19th century, diagnoses of hysteria persisted, but the face of the disease changed when the “witch” transformed into the “nervous” hysteric. As the European witch-hunts climaxed in the 17th century, a woman’s hysterical symptoms (a disinterest in marriage and “unquenchable sexual thirst,” to name two) were often confused with Satanism, the latter punishable by execution. Rousseau in his chapter “ A Strange Pathology: Hysteria in the Early Modern Period” of Hysteria Beyond Freud. The actual term hysteria first emerges during the Medieval witch trials as an “explicit diagnostic category within the development of demonology,” notes professor G.S.
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