Asylums: More than Enough to Drive Women Crazy

We all know that women’s rights have been late to the party.   State laws didn’t start allowing us to control our own earnings until the mid-nineteenth century, and in many states, women couldn’t manage their own property after they were married.  Laws prohibited women from doing things that men took for granted (like smoking in public or using contraception) on the pretext of “protecting women’s health.” Divorce, extremely difficult to obtain, was fraught with social and financial peril (Today’s “no fault” variety didn’t come into play until the 1960’s!).  Children were the “property” of the husband, not the wife–she had no legal right to them if she left her marriage, no matter how disastrous the union turned out to be. And, of course, women didn’t get the right to vote in federal elections until 1920, fifty years after the Fifteenth Amendment granted that right to men regardless of color (although it took nearly a century for that right to be solidified without prejudice).

So, it isn’t surprising that when progressive ideas about treating the mentally ill led to the construction of state mental hospitals across the country, many of the institutions were used to keep women in their place.  In researching my latest novel, The Madness of Mrs. Whittaker, I found several cases where women were unjustly committed to such asylums under the guise of treating them for some form of “neurasthenia.”

First identified in the 1830’s, neurasthenia was made popular by the neurologist George Miller Beard in 1869.  The diagnosis was used to describe a broad range of maladies that seemed to afflict primarily the middle and upper classes during the late nineteenth-early twentieth century.  According to Beard and countless physicians who followed him, these patients were sufffering from the “stress” of modern American life.  Symptoms included headaches, rashes, painful menstrual periods and melancholy, all the way up to overly sexual behavior (called “lasciviousness”), excessive anger, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts–in short, any behavior that was not in line with the societal dictates of the time.

I explore how men were treated for neurasthenia in my novel The Price of Compassion (Book Four of “The Golden City” series).  The Main character, Dr. Tom Justice, has gone through a traumatic experience that results in a physical impairment.  The prescription for men back then was action a la Teddy Roosevelt (who was said to suffer from neurasthenia himself).  Rigorous physical activity was supposed to get rid of the stress–not a bad idea!

Unfortunately, the opposite was true for women.  Doctors (overwhelmingly male) told them the cure for their emotion-driven ailment, no matter what it was, was complete removal from the stress of everyday life.  Female patients were to have as little stimulus as possible in the hope that their “nervous disorder” would calm down and go away.

To get a sense of what women suffered through during this period, check out the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. You can download it on the site globalgreyebooks  here.  It was apparently semi-autobiographical, and while I won’t reveal anything more about the piece, I will say it was often categorized as a horror story!

Such a treatment plan was made to order for asylums.  Originally, such institutions were designed to proactively treat patients with kindness and modern therapeutic techniques.  Unfortunately, as soon as the mental hospitals were built, they were filled to excess capacity, leading to overcrowded conditions and a business model that paid more attention to maintenance than therapy.

Thus, if you were a woman who didn’t know your place, and you had a spouse or family member who wanted you out of the picture, it didn’t take much to have you committed against your will so that you could “relearn” what it meant to be an acceptable female in society.

I came across a newspaper article from 1903 in which this happened, and I used it as the historical seed from which my novel grew.  A young mother who happened to believe in Spiritualism (a religious movement I also cover in the book) was accused of being insane by her mother and sister, and was committed against her will to an asylum in South Dakota.  How she dealt with her situation inspired me to write my own version, and The Madness of Mrs. Whittaker is the result.

But a more notorious example can be found from the mid-nineteenth century and has been written about by Barbara Sapinsley in her history, The Private War of Mrs. Packard.  Elizabeth Ware Packard, married to a minister, had six children and was active in her husband’s church–until she began teaching principles that he and the church elders disagreed with.  She and her husband clashed on theology as well as child-rearing, finances–even the issue of slavery.  If ever a marriage was destined to fail, this was it! One argument led to another until Elizabeth’s spouse was angry enough to have her committed to an asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois because she was “a little insane.”

Illinois law in 1860 said that a public hearing had to be held before a woman could be committed; however an exception was made for a married woman. Her husband could commit her without a hearing and without his wife’s permission! Needless to say, Mrs. Packard was mad as hell and spent the next three years working to get herself released.  Eventually her children pressured the asylum’s doctors enough to release her and they did so–after pronouncing her “incurable.” When she returned home, her husband locked her in an upstairs room and nailed the window shut! Luckily she was able to get a message to a friend, who helped her escape and arranged for a hearing at which she was finally pronounced sane–after hearing from male witnesses, by the way, who agreed that it didn’t make a woman insane just because she disagreed with you!

In the meantime, Elizabeth’s estranged husband had left the state, taking the children with him; it took several more years for her to right that particular wrong.  During that decade and beyond, she worked tirelessly, through speaking, writing and petitioning state legislatures, to get laws passed that protected women from the horrors she’d experienced.

We’ve come a long, long way from those trying times, and we have strong-minded and strong-willed women like Elizabeth Packard to thank for many of the rights we take for granted today.