Showalter states that the ratio of women to men in psychiatric care definitely favored women. She argues that women were labelled mad because of mental illness as defined by male psychiatrists, but that diagnosis and treatment changed over time. Mrs. Showalter divided the specific historical period she studied into three phases: Psychiatric Victorianism, psychiatric Darwinism and psychiatric modernism. In the first period, in which the large public asylums were constructed following the Lunatics Act of 1845, Victorians endeavored to restore sanity through re-education, work and religion without the use of mechanical restraints, though they were mostly just isolated from the rest of society. Women were viewed as childlike, irrational and sexually unstable, given no legal or economic power, which accounts for the high number of female patients.
Darwinism changed psychiatric attitudes for the worse. The mentally ill were considered evolutionary failures. Eugenics was seen as the best way to thin the pack. Insanity became associated with lower classes, poverty and criminality. The stereotype of the "hysterical woman" was established, and restrictions imposed on 19th-century middle-class girls followed in its wake.
After World War II and the emergence of "shell shocked" victims, society was forced to accept that men had equal propensity for hysteria. Psychiatric treatment (Showalter claims that more women were "treated" than men) included insulin coma, electroconvulsive therapy and prefrontal lobotomy. Storr agrees with Showalter that there were more women in these institutes because more of them were diagnosed with mental illnesses, though he argues that this is not only due to chauvinistic society. Citing "The Social Origins of Depression: A Study of Psychiatric Disorder in Women" (1978), women were more liable to severe depression if they had three or more children under the age of 14 at home; if they were isolated without someone to confide in; and if they had lost their mother before the age of 11. These factors must have also contributed to these numbers.
Buck vs. Bell is one example of a legally powerless girl vs. an authoritative patriarchal society. The facts that she was on the honor role and had been raped could be disregarded; that she was female, poor and pregnant were not. In order to make a point---and a morally reprehensible one---these "details" were ignored; she was a woman, and therefore an easy target in that society, what with the "hysterical woman" stereotype and the belief that women were less intelligent or capable than men to begin with. While certainly Buck's poverty and the alleged strangeness of her mother and illegitimate daughter were main arguments against her, one could argue that another non-sequitur is that Buck is female, and that worked against her.
She was euthanized; by inference, so were a lot of women either rightly or wrongly institutionalized during that time.
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