Nor, among the institutionalised insane, did the imbalance ever amount to more than a few per cent, and this itself was quite possibly attributable to the greater longevity of the ‘weaker’ sex and to the disposition of the asylum authorities to keep female lunatics institutionalised longer than their male counterparts.

It was only after the middle of the 19th century, when the madhouses of the Gothic novelists had supposedly been transformed into the domestic retreats favoured by the Victorian lunacy reformers, that women began gradually to outnumber men among those legally designated as mad – first among the pauper residuum who contributed the bulk of the rapid rise in the ranks of mad folk, and not till the end of the century among their genteel and affluent cousins. Still, for the most part, this has not been in such gross disproportion that one could sensibly call the disorder a pre-eminently feminine one and there have even been occasions when men have constituted a substantial majority of those officially identified as mad.įor example, against the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who consulted the 17th-century astrological physician Richard Napier for treatment of their mopish or melancholic moods were women, one must set the observation that, as best one can judge from the admittedly defective data, men greatly outnumbered women among the inmates of 18th and early 19th-century madhouses. One may plausibly contend that, for much of the past two or three centuries, women have outnumbered men in the ranks of the mentally disturbed. Can this, however, justify a move to label madness ‘the female malady’? Not, surely (and contrary to what Showalter sometimes seems to suggest), in any straightforward statistical fashion. Her account makes it plain that in the psychiatric domain, as in the conventionally-defined Third World, the position and treatment of women consistently turn out to be even less enviable than those endured by men.

For this reason, among many others, Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is to be welcomed, for its primary focus is upon this neglected group – for the most part, on female patients. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily put it, ‘like the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’.

Most recent work on the history of psychiatry has tended to focus on the history of institutions, of ideas, and of the psychiatric profession itself, and to ignore those for whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected.

Showalter the female malady