One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline.
It seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her.
“Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”
That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women — romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination — comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering.
clipped from: www.nytimes.com