The Female Malady
1985
First Published
4.17
Average Rating
309
Number of Pages
In this informative, timely and often harrowing study, Elaine Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about 'proper' feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women 'to their senses', she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing, to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness.
Avg Rating
4.17
Number of Ratings
921
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
47%
3 STARS
14%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
0%
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