A gift from the artist, who was once a neighbor, Showalter treasures it for its humor, wisdom, and truth about women's lives. One of the nation's most renowned feminist critics, Showalter has impressive academic credentials but aims to move into the main stream of public intellectual debate. She is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and professor of English at Princeton University. She has been a television critic for People magazine, and a regular commentator on BBC radio and television. A glance back at the millennial panics of the year 1000 A.D., assures historians that there's a rough ride ahead.
Hysteria is part of everyday life.
Newspapers, magazines, talk shows, self-help books, and of course the Internet ensure that ideas, once planted, manifest themselves internationally as symptoms. Throughout its history, hysteria has been associated with women. Classic symptoms in women were manifest as convulsive attacks, random pains, and choking. Fears and feelings that modern citizens cannot express are transformed into a culturally acceptable language of distress. These individual hysterias connect with modern social movements to produce psychological epidemics.