Women and Madness
in Nineteenth-Century Bloomsbury
by Dr Mary Chapman
During the early 1800s, attitudes to mental illness changed as insanity, previously considered a spiritual concern, became understood as a disease. Psychiatry developed gradually in response to these shifting beliefs, and from 1845 onwards individuals who suffered from insanity were classed as patients and housed in special institutions designated for their care: asylums. The concept of insanity as a disease of the body rather than the spirit encouraged doctors to look for causes within the brain, nerves, and other organs. In women, the obvious differences of reproductive biology — which appeared so significant in comparison with the male body (considered the default human form) — were thought to be key; reproduction was the female body’s most important physiological function, impacting all others. Nineteenth-century theories of female insanity therefore linked the reproductive organs, nerves, and brain in a sympathetic loop.
Doctors believed that the reproductive system drew so much nervous energy from the female body that women were especially liable to mental disease, particularly during the reproductive changes of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. They described specific classes of insanity related to women’s reproductive life, such as puerperal mania (what we might now call postpartum psychosis) and climacteric insanity (insanity of menopause). The relationship between the female reproductive organs and mental disease was understood as responsive rather than directly causal, and disturbance of reproductive activity could be a symptom or an effect of mental ill-health. Signs and symptoms of madness included erotic or unfeminine behaviour (such as aggression), ovarian or uterine irritation, and irregularity of menstruation. Treatments often focused on returning the female patient’s reproductive state to its natural equilibrium, such as encouraging the menses to return if they had stopped. These treatments ranged from enforced bed rest to the surgical removal of the clitoris or ovaries.
The nineteenth-century belief in the importance of reproduction to the female body and mind stemmed from long-standing gendered social ideologies which placed women’s maternal and domestic role at the heart of their identity. Psychiatry encouraged these beliefs by providing them with a scientific basis in theories of female insanity. These medical ‘facts’ then reinforced such ideologies as truthful and correct, further supporting women’s place in society as domestic caregivers. Women were cautioned to avoid anything which could spark an episode of mental illness, through upsetting the delicate balance of their reproductive and nervous health. This included all activities which went against their ‘natural’ purpose in life as mothers and wives: intellectual work, vigorous physical activity, and emotional or sexual excitement. By the second half of the nineteenth century, psychiatry seemed to provide evidence that the restrictions placed on women by Victorian society were necessary for their health and wellbeing.
Indeed, the public were well aware of medical theories about the female mind and used them to uphold traditional gender roles. Mental disease was often discussed in the press, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century when mental illness, and its treatment, was a popular topic of debate due to rising asylum populations and an apparent increase in nervous disorders. Gendered ideas about the female mind were prevalent. For example, I.P. Davis, MD, wrote an article on hysteria for the magazine Golden Hours, published in 1883. Davis described how hysteria ‘is very much more common among women than among men’ and ‘in many cases its cause exists in some disease or irritation of some organ particular to women, particularly the womb.’[i] However, Davis then abandoned science and blamed the prevalence of hysteria in modern society on young girls reading ‘poisonous fiction’ about ‘spirit-mediums,’ ‘animated manikins,’ ‘detectives’, and ‘Indian fighters.’[ii] These comments appear to be Davis’s personal views about an activity he considered unsuitable for young girls, views which may well have been shared by the conservative readership of the magazine in which he published.
We can gain a glimpse of what mentally ill women may have experienced through the writing of one Bloomsbury resident in particular, poet and author Amy Levy, who chose to explore her own mental illness in her literature. Levy was an educated, middle-class Jewish woman who supported herself through her writing. Her family home was at Endsleigh Gardens, just next to University College London and a stone’s throw from the British Museum, and she mixed with a literary, progressive crowd. Levy suffered from low moods throughout her life and tragically committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven, in 1889. Her contemporaries, and later critics, have made connections between Levy’s marginality as an unconventional woman in her society, and the mental illness which led to her death; many members of her society would have believed that deviance from the traditional feminine role of wife and mother was unhealthy.
However, Levy’s poetry and fiction show a young woman who was able to find solace in a community of writers whose creativity and sensitivity enabled them to produce great literature, at the same time as it predisposed them to mental suffering. In ‘London Poets (In Memoriam)’ (1889), Levy idolises a lineage of melancholic poets, situating herself as their heir. Levy retraces the steps of those who ‘with weary hearts’ walked ‘the streets and squares where now I tread,’ and imagines for the dead an emotional life like her own; the ‘sorrow of their souls to them did seem/As real as mine to me, as permanent.’ Levy takes satisfaction in the belief that others ‘wrestled’ with the melancholy she feels, creating kinship with a literary ancestry who shared her poetic temperament.[iii] Levy was able to give meaning to her mental illness, beyond the narrative of instability which characterized medical attitudes to the female mind.
Women were also fighting back against the idea that the female brain was weaker than the male, particularly as they began to prove their ability to work and study. Higher education and the professions started to open up to women from the 1870s onwards, and many fought to compete on equal footing with men. In Bloomsbury, The London School of Medicine for Women was founded in a building near Brunswick Square, training the first female doctors from 1874 (they received their clinical instruction from the nearby Royal Free Hospital). Dr Helen Boyle was one of these pioneering women, training at the School from 1889-1893. Boyle went on to become one of the first female psychiatrists in Britain, working at Claybury Asylum in London, before opening her own mental hospital in Brighton in 1905: the Lady Chichester Hospital. The Lady Chichester was exclusively for women in the early stages of nervous disorders, and was staffed entirely by female physicians, as well as having an all-female board. Boyle claimed that as women her staff were uniquely qualified to treat female patients. At the turn of the twentieth century, women were beginning to participate in the medical science which would inform beliefs about the human mind, and shape treatments for the female brain in illness.
Women also took the opportunity to weigh in on public debates about the female mind and its capacities. In 1874, psychiatrist Henry Maudsley published an essay in the popular monthly magazine the Fortnightly Review, entitled ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’. Maudsley’s article argued that girls were unfit to be educated in the same manner as boys, as their reproductive biology made their minds too unstable for the hard study required. In particular, he suggested that the menstrual cycle interfered so much with women’s energy reserves that to study during this time made women liable to nervous exhaustion and insanity: ‘irregularity, imperfection, arrest, or excess’ could occur during menstruation, and ‘pallor, lassitude, debility, sleeplessness, headache, neuralgia, and then worse ills’ would follow in consequence.[iv] Several women replied to Maudsley in the press, disputing his claims. Two of these responses came from female doctors working at the Bloomsbury based London School of Medicine for Women, Royal Free Hospital, and New Hospital for Women: Drs Sophia Jex-Blake and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Jex-Blake exposed the sexism inherent in Maudsley’s views, including him in a ‘certain class of male writers [who] constantly assume that no labour is severe except that usually allocated to men, and that it is only when women venture to invade that field that they are likely to be overtasked.’[v] But Garrett Anderson’s reply, also in the Fortnightly Review, was especially ground-breaking as her very existence as an educated, working doctor, mother, and wife, proved that her professional life did not interfere with her health or reproductive capacities whatsoever. Indeed, as she claimed, in ‘women of good health, the natural recurrence of this function is not recognised as causing anything more than very temporary malaise, and frequently not even that.’[vi] Psychiatry was a new discipline in the nineteenth century, but Maudsley’s ideas were rooted in much older ways of thinking about the female body. Bloomsbury, as the site of several major learned institutions, universities, and hospitals in London, was the home and workplace of the pioneering women who were to challenge these sexist beliefs about the female mind and create social change into the next century.
Primary Sources (in order of appearance)
I.P. Davis, ‘Hygiene for Girls’, Golden Hours: A Monthly Magazine for Family and General Reading (1883), 593-597.
Amy Levy, ‘London Poets (In Memoriam)’, A Minor Poet and Other Verse (2nd ed.) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 9.
Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (1874), 466-483.
Sophia Jex-Blake, ‘Sex in Education’, Examiner (2 May 21874), 457.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (1874), 582-594.
See Also
Mary Chapman, ‘The Female Mind in the Periodical Press: Henry Maudsley’s “Sex in Mind and in Education”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 53:3 (2020), 403-425.
Mary Chapman, Writing Women’s Madness: Literature and the Development of Gendered Psycho-Medical Theory, 1845-1914, PhD thesis (University of Leeds, 2021).
[i] I.P. Davis, ‘Hygiene for Girls’, Golden Hours: A Monthly Magazine for Family and General Reading (1883), 593.
[ii] Davis, 596.
[iii] Amy Levy, ‘London Poets (In Memoriam)’, A Minor Poet and Other Verse (2nd ed.) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 9.
[iv] Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (1874), 474.
[v] Sophia Jex-Blake, ‘Sex in Education’, Examiner (2 May 21874), 457.
[vi] Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (1874), 586.
Dr Mary Chapman is Alan F Price Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Dr Chapman’s research focuses on the periodical press and medical practice during the Victorian period. Her work centres on women in medicine, as both practitioners and patients. She has published on perceptions of the female mind in the Victorian press (Victorian Periodicals Review, 2020), and on medical women’s magazines (Humanities, forthcoming 2024).