With this discovery, curative efforts began to include listening to the histories of these women who were made to talk out their past. It was Sigmund Freud who redefined it as “psychic” rather than a neurological disease with sexual disturbance in its aetiology.
Till late in the nineteenth century, hysteria was associated with nervous disorders in women. Both historians and psychologists have recorded an overrepresentation of women among the mentally ill in western countries. The attitude of society to madness in woman has a long history of male cruelty and woman’s humiliation. For centuries, it was believed to be a condition of woman’s illness in which the uterus was thought to be wandering. In so doing, I point to the existence of a discrepancy between the 19th century, a period where French women and men were almost equally 'insane', and the 20th century, where women were significantly more numerous than men to be sent to psychiatric facilities-a finding that leads to reconsider the links between gender and psychiatric confinement.Abstract: Hysteria is deemed as a woman’s malady. Specifically, I analyse the ratio of women and men who were locked up in France during the 'great age' of the asylum (from 1838 to 1939). It especially focuses on one aspect: that of statistics. Was insanity a 'female malady' in that country as well? This is what this article aims to examine, seeking to assess the part played by sexual differences on the construction of 'mental vulnerability' in France. In stern contrast with these American and British historiographies, almost no historical research on the relationships between gender and madness has been conducted in France. These two factors would thus explain why more women than men have been psychiatrically labeled-madness being a 'female malady' in essence, a social construction typical of these modern societies in which women are alienated. Moreover, in a world dominated by patriarchal bourgeois ideals, it has also been considered that women had more of a tendency towards 'breakdown' when they could not conform to the 'feminine role'. As up until the middle of the 20th century, psychiatrists mostly comprised men who generally believed in the inferiority of the female psyche, it has been assumed that they were more inclined to estimate that ladies with 'abnormal' behaviour had to be confined. For many authors working from a gender perspective, asylums appear as patriarchal establishments that have been used to cast aside all of those women who have questioned male domination-both the unsound and broken women as much as the rebellious ones. Since Phyllis Chesler and Elaine Showalter's classic accounts, the field of 'gender studies' in the history of psychiatry has become a classic one, particularly in Britain and the United States.
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