
Few sciences have a history as dark and disturbing as the scientific practices of psychology and psychiatry. Far from a perfect science, hypotheses can only be proved through experimentation, often on people, which sees a large range of trial and error, much to the detriment of the people in the trial. Particularly early on in its development, patients in psychiatry were brutalized and ignored. Often receiving the brunt of this mistreatment were the women of the time period. Whether they were working in the asylums or a patient, women were marginalized and scrutinized as being less than their male counterparts. Nellie Bly attempted to expose this bias when she went undercover to record the happenings at an asylum. Because of Tasca’s writing in “Women And Hysteria In The History of Mental Health” and Hewitt’s “Women Working ‘Amidst The Mad’: Domesticity as Psychiatric Treatment In Nineteenth-Century Paris”, readers can better understand the social and psychological pressures facing women at the time of Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House.

In “Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health” by Cecilia Tasca, Tasca attempts to delve into the history of mental illness and the treatment of women by mental health professionals, which was often less than human. She points to evidence throughout the years that shows there was a largely accepted perception of women as being less mentally stable than men. That line of thinking continues today, but to a much lesser degree than in the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout the piece, Tasca attempts to answer questions about the perception of women in asylums and explain the misperceptions and lack of understanding that existed in psychiatry not too long ago. She specifically focuses on hysteria, a mental illness often attributed to women in the 19th century. Hysteria is explained as a disorder that inflicted woman, though the symptoms are vague and easily manipulated to fit a wide variety of women. To exploit this trigger-happy diagnosis, Bly feigned madness in order to be committed to an asylum. She writes her emotional state about arriving at the madhouse as such: “Pronounced insane by four expert doctors and shut up behind the unmerciful bolts and bars of a madhouse! Not to be confined alone, but to be a companion, day and night, of senseless, chattering lunatics; to sleep with them, to eat with them, to be considered one of them, was an uncomfortable position” (Bly 431). However, while Bly describes the women as chattering lunatics, she neglects to realize that some of them are as sane as she is, mislabeled with a diagnosis as easily applied as a man’s will and status can get a doctor to pronounce it. 

Further, the history of hysteria can better help the reader to grasp the stigma against women during the time period. Tasca moves her timeline around the world, addressing the comprehensive history of the disorder, starting with Ancient Egypt and moving all the way through contemporary psychiatry. For hundreds of years, hysteria was seen as a disorder than only women could inherit and it was thought to be linked through the uterus. This explains the blatant prejudice Bly observes in her novel, as the women seem to be the only patients diagnosed with Hysteria in Bly’s accounts. One has to wonder what “nervousness” means when applied as a symptom of hysteria, for example, and how it could be that only women demonstrate such a broad behaviorism that is deemed insane. Tasca also attempts to reveal some of the treatment methods and theories that were popular at the time. Some psychiatrists believed hysteria to be the result of demonization, while others took a more scientific approach. Attempts to cure it ranged from being as tame as herbal remedies, and as extreme as long term residence in a mental asylum, committed along with every other person who was deemed crazy. This is seen through Bly’s depictions of the treatment she received at the asylum. For example, when she writes of her examination, Bly describes it as a very clinical and impersonal experience, particularly at the end: “She lifted my dress and skirts and wrote down one pair shoes, one pair stockings, one cloth dress, one straw sailor hat, and so on” (Bly 433). This demonstrates the distance with which doctors viewed their patients, which may explain why so many psychiatrists and psychologists of the time felt so comfortable administering treatments that today would be considered by many to be savagely inappropriate.

In Jessie Hewitt’s “‘Women Working "Amidst The Mad’: Domesticity As Psychiatric Treatment In Nineteenth-Century Paris”, Hewitt tackles the issue of women in psychiatry as well, though from an entirely different angle. The gender bias of psychiatry did not end at the treatment and diagnosis of the female patients, and in fact extended into the social expectations put on women working in psychiatry and psychology. Instead of approaching the history of psychiatry from the perspective of a client or examining the treatments used, Hewitt looks into the life of a female asylum director and daughter of a well-known doctor. She offers one possible explanation for the influence of gender place in the psychiatric field: “The development of the family life method depended on two interrelated and roughly concurrent phenomena: the rise of the middle classes, which resulted in the gendered separation… as an ideal if not a universal practice, and the development of modern ideas about mental illness and its treatment” (Hewitt). In other words, the social pressures on women increased as the picture-esqe vision of a middle class family came to light, including that of a stereotypical middle class mother of the time period. Simultaneously, the practices in psychological medicine were on the rise. Asylums were expected to run like families in a sense, and women were expected to take on the role of “mother” to the patients. They were supposed to be nurturing and warm, while still maintaining professionalism. However, this “nurturing” approach Hewitt describes is seldom seen in Bly’s account, except perhaps for the nurse who insists Bly eat to maintain her sanity. Hewitt’s text serves as a platform to compare and contrast with Bly’s experience. It proves that social expectations were placed on women, regardless of which side of the asylum they were on and yet, many female nurses seem to reject those social pressures, just as the patients diagnosed with hysteria seem to object to the label placed on them. 

Through the two outside texts used, “Women And Hysteria In The History of Mental Health” and “Women Working ‘Amidst The Mad’: Domesticity as Psychiatric Treatment In Nineteenth-Century Paris”, one can better develop an understanding of the social context of Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House. Both texts demonstrate that there were immense pressures facing women in a psychological context, either because they had a seemingly imaginary and vague affliction attributed to them, with no opportunity for them to object and prove their sanity, or because female nurses and caretakers at asylums had certain expectations placed on them that were not placed on their male counterparts. Both texts add to the context of Bly’s work. There is still a lot of societal expectations on women, and many still hold the notion that women are less mentally stable, more sensitive and fragile than men. Men are expected to be stoic and strong, women are viewed as weaker and more vulnerable. However, psychology has come very far since Bly’s report. 
