Over the past century, women have made great progress in the feminist movement in effort to create equality between men and women. Although women have equal rights as men, women are still viewed as inferior to men in our social culture despite the equality of rights. In this past September, Hillary Clinton nearly passed out in public after being diagnosed with pneumonia, and there was talk in the media shortly after that she would not be fit to serve as President of the United States, even though she would recover from her pneumonia soon. Vice News states that “Hillary Clinton appeared unsteady and had to be helped to a waiting van during a memorial ceremony for victims of 9/11 in New York City on Sunday, giving her Republican opponent the ammunition he needed to continue his recent line of attack: that the former Secretary of State isn't healthy enough to serve as president of the United States.” This is proof that the media and men portray women as weak and incapable. Because if it were Hillary’s male competitor, it would not have been made up as that big of a deal. Constantly a woman’s traits are portrayed as signs of weakness and inferiority. By looking at Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s, The Yellow Wallpaper and multiple peer-reviewed articles, we can see that woman have been made out to be weak, incapable, reliant on men in society for years and forced into positions and “treatments” based off what men believe that women should be.

       Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written as journal entries narrated by a woman who suffers from nervous depression after the birth of her baby and her husband/ doctor misdiagnoses her with hysteria. Her treatment for her illness requires no physical activity and she is forbidden from mental activity such as writing and hard thinking, which is known as the rest cure. She believes that the treatment given to her by her husband doesn’t help her condition but that writing will help her, so she writes in this secret journal. As the treatment continues, the writer can see the narrator start to get paranoid and her mental satiability deteriorates. The narrator fixates on the yellow wallpaper and believes that there is a woman trapped in the wall paper. The narrator then tears down the wallpaper to set the woman free. The short story concludes with the narrator’s husband returning to bring her back to their home and shortly after realizing that she has gone insane.

       Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to portray the mental deterioration of the narrator and to protest the oppression both medically and professionally against women in the nineteenth century. After her own personal experience being treated with the rest cure from Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Gilman wanted to convince Mitchell and anyone else who read the story that the rest cure was based off misdiagnoses and it did more harm than help. The husband in the short story who also acted as the narrator’s doctor were used by Gilman to show that men acted like they had women’s best interest at heart when they were diagnosing them as mentally ill so women would keep their roles as house wives and stay at home mothers rather than moving out into the world and taking male occupied jobs away from them. The wallpaper acts as a symbol that shows disgust of the role that society believed a woman must play and her imprisonment by her own husband and forced to rely on only him. Gilman’s short story gave the opportunity for people to realize the oppression against women in the 19th century which was a breakthrough in the feminist movement at that time.

While Charlotte Perkins Gilman, portrays the rest cure and hysteria along with the oppression against women in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but in “The Rest Cure Revisited”, Diana Martin analyzes the nature of the rest cure that was used on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and created by S. Weir Mitchell during the nineteenth century. Martin analyzed each step of Mitchell’s rest cure and the results of the treatment on Gilman. Martin states that Mitchell’s treatment was meant for women whose nervousness depleted their health and made them unhealthily thin. Emotional disorders in this day of age were treated by the new therapy, the rest cure. The cure was made solely for women and was based off rest, isolation, and feeding. Electrotherapy was occasionally used to try to reverse the nervousness and depression in women. The normal patient was prescribed all day bed rest for many days at a time until after the patient was believed to be cured from their mental illness. Visitation was strictly prohibited and the only human interaction the patient could have was through the nurse that watches over her and keeps her thoughts from “wandering.” Women were also given strange diets consisting of milk and eggs, and this diet could sometimes cause the patient to become obese, especially since physically activity was prohibited, or even their brain activity stop. Martin states that Mitchell believed that a healthy woman was a woman who didn’t think and only focused on the duties that were believed to be the sole purpose of women. Martin also claimed that based off looking at the descriptions of Mitchell’s patients that he was very hostile and didn’t believe that woman should be treated as intelligent human beings. She also believed that Charlotte Perkins Gilman could have sensed this in Mitchell. Gilman was an intelligent writer who believed that women deserved the same intellectual rights that men have. After attempting to follow Mitchell’s treatment, Gilman believed that the cure almost drove her border line insane. And when she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”, she was showing not only just Mitchell and her husband how the cure affected her, but also the world. Martin outlines the friction between patient and doctor by doing this.

       Dianna Martin’s article on the treatment of Charlotte Perkins Gillman, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the connection between the treatment the narrator was forced to endure and Gilman’s very own treatment. This shows the truth behind the story and the obvious oppression of women at this time. In Martin’s article, Gilman was told to have not had a good patient-doctor relationship with Dr. Mitchell because he felt he knew what was best for Gilman when it didn’t seem that it was the best for her. This proves that male doctors misdiagnosed women and gave them a treatment that heart them more than helped them. With the electrotherapy and the strange diets, to absolutely no social interaction, male doctors continued to manipulate women and the way they were seen on a social and professional level. Martin explains that after Gilman decided to take a step away from the male dominance and stop being treated, she began to write again and completely recovered mentally. This can lead to the idea that men used the rest cure treatment to misdiagnose and treat women who believed to intellectually challenge men, like Gilman did with her writing. 

While Dianna Martin analyzes the rest cure and misdiagnoses of Charlotte Perkins Gillman, in “Gender, Class, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France”, Jill Harsin talks about how hysteria has been viewed as the way men exaggerate the way women should act in the household in the nineteenth century. Jean-Martin Charcot was known to know extensive knowledge about hysteria and its phases.  Women were proved to distrust men as they were abused by their husbands and their doctors treating them in the asylums when they should have been helping them. The underlying cause of most patients being admitted into an asylum stemmed from the abuse of a male in their life. They were given electric shock treatment and prescribed weird medicines which mostly didn’t show improvement for women, asylums had become a prison even more so than their own home.

Harsin’s article proves that hysteria could have been a way that men exaggerated women’s characteristics and manipulated the way that they believed that women should act and what position they should have in the household. Harsin said that many women who were admitted into mental hospitals blamed their mental state on their husbands or men in their life. Then when they reached the mental hospitals and began treatment by male doctor’s they realized that it was not in men’s best interest for women to be mentally sound. Harsin’s article gave the proof needed to believe that women were believed to be weaker and needed to rely on men for help, when it was that was just what men wanted women to believe.

While Jill Harsin explains that hysteria was an exaggerations of women’s mental illness by men, in “The Myths of Social Control and Custodial Oppression: Patterns of Psychiatric Medicine in Late Nineteenth-Century Institutions”, Constance M. McGovern talks about how half of the patients that suffered with mental illnesses suffered with a mental illness related to their gender. For women, their illness stemmed from problems related to their reproductive system, like menstruation, menopause, and child birth. They often had trouble dealing with relationships with family members and inability to control their emotions. Doctors believes that men’s illnesses were strictly physical. Men mostly had problems with alcohol and tobacco substance because of their inability to handle their emotions and sexual desires. Most doctors in asylums believed that there was little they could do for men because they didn’t respond to the type of treatment given to them.

McGovern’s article outlines the differences on the treatments on men and women who were both believed to be mentally ill. She states that men’s mentally illness was believed to be treated successfully with physical activity and anything masculine, when women’s treatments were exactly the opposite. McGovern said that men were believed not to be able to be mentally ill, tat mental illness was a weakness that only women could have. This again shows the oppression against women that women were portrayed as weak and that only women could be mentally ill.

While Constance McGovern explains that most of the differences in the treatments of mental illness was directly related to gender, in “Women, madness and psychiatry: Insane or persuaded?”, Garcia talks about how in the nineteenth century, feminism was becoming more popular in Europe and the United States and started to make steps toward equal rights between genders. Around the same type the mental illness hysteria was brought forward. As research and awareness grew, more and more women were diagnosed with hysteria and sent to asylums. This mental illness’s symptoms were all normal character traits of a women. The more feminism surfaced the more hysteria did as well. It might be argued that hysteria and mental illnesses among women in the nineteenth century were used to weaken woman as a gender, setting back feminist movements.

       Garcia’s article directly states the oppression of women throughout Europe and the United States. Around the 19th century, the feminist movement became quite popular, as women started to believe that there was so much more for then than being a housewife and taking care of her many children. Women began to realize that they are equal to men that they deserve the same opportunities that men have. Women began to read and write more, and started to intellectually challenge men who weren’t very happy about what was going on. They didn’t want to lose their piece of property (what they believed women was to them) and they didn’t want to lose the clean house and home cooked meals and the many children that could be their legacy. It can be argued that men didn’t want to lose all of this so created an illness, hysteria, that set the feminist movement back. That men were so afraid of not being superior that they had to create a mental illness to make women look weak.

       For over a century, women have been perceived as weak and inferior to men. Society believed that women are not as smart as men, or as strong as men, or as capable as men. The feminist movement eventually achieved equal rights for women but women are still not viewed as equal to men. The first female presidential candidate was blasted all throughout the media for being weaker than her opponent in all areas of the spectrum. Women are still being looked at as lesser in the professional workplace, that male bosses seem to have more authority than female bosses. In relationships, women are looked at as the less dominate partner. That women must rely on their spouses or boyfriends to help them have a better life, because they are believed to not be able to give it to themselves. Oppression against women is everywhere around the world, and even worse in some countries. In some countries wives and daughters are portrayed as the husbands and once it is time for the daughter to be get married she is passed on live property onto the next owner. Women have gained equal rights but not equal respect. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the many peer-reviewed articles, women were posed as a threat to men so men created a treatment based entirely on women and keeping them from having any physical, intellectual, or social activity. Oppression against women has been prevalent since the 19th century and hasn’t changed at all.
