num_pages: 310
description: In this informative, timely and often harrowing study, Elaine Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about 'proper' feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women 'to their senses', she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing, to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness.
language: English
title: The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980
titlecomplete: The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980
genres: Gender, Mental Health, Womens, Mental Illness, Womens Studies, Psychology, Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Research
ratings_count: 831
publisher: Penguin Books