Suffocating The Mother

“To do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.
” - Clement of Alexandria (150–215 ACE)
"To be rapable ... defines what a woman is’ …
The discourse of misogyny runs like a rich vein throughout the Page | 1
breadth of medieval literature.
Medieval Misogyny
R. Howard Bloch
If the above title seems redundant, it is because the topic of

misogyny, like the mace or chastity belt, participates in a
vestigial horror practically synonymous with the term
medieval, and because one of the assumptions governing our
perception of the Middle Ages is the viral presence of
antifeminism.
suffocating
The mother
on misogyny and matrimony -
on female malady and monstrosity
- ancient, medieval & early modern
curated by
amma birago
For the slave has no deliberative faculty
(bouleutikon) at all; the woman has, but it is without
authority (akuron), and the child has, but it is
immature.
Only a deep understanding

of our propensity to retreat
to misogyny in time of crisis
can help us transcend
this pattern.
Diane Jonte Pace
The woman "is in every respect backward, lacking in reason
and reflection ... a kind of middle step between the child and
the man, who is the true human being. … In the last resort,
women exist solely for the propagation of the race."
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
As regards the sexes the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male the ruler and the female the subject.
- Aristotle in the Politics
“To do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.” - Clement of Alexandria (150–215 ACE)
[On] Militant Hysteria –

No doctor . ... can ever lose sight of the fact that
the mind of woman is always threatened with danger Page | 2
from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.”
Sir Almroth Wright
Letter On Militant Hysteria
Reprinted By Permission From The Times (London), March 28, 1919.
To The Editor Of The Times
Masculinity and femininity, then, are conceived through relationships of domination organized around active and
passive roles. The well- known Christian theologian and contemporary of Galen, Clement of Alexandria (150–215
ACE), neatly summarizes the point: “to do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.”51 This is an
assumption that grounds much of what Manne calls “the logic of misogyny.”
The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny
Christia Mercer
First, man is "able to exist" because of his identification

with a masculine-paternal God (Irigaray 1993a, 61). Second, that no divinity,
and no other symbolic figure in Western culture plays an equivalent role for women.
Third, the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to the
atrophied state of women's identity, subjectivity, and community.
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women - Luce Irigaray on Divinity
Penelope Deutscher
A woman coming from a man’s rib is reverse birth - creation of woman by man. There is power in creation and she
argues that there was probably a political motivation for power and control underlying this mythology (Stone, 219).
The myth of Eve’s betrayal was, according to Stone, designed to continue the suppression of the goddess religion
even after a historical shift occurred (Stone, 198).
Patriarchy and the Power of Myth: Exploring the Significance of a Matriarchal Prehistory
Grace Varada Brandmaier
A Briefe Discourse Of A Disease Called

The Suffocation Of The Mother - 1603.
"Suffocation of the Mother" (the term “mother” being an antiquated usage of uterus) or strangulatus uteri, as
different from bewitchment and asserted that there were natural causes for insanity and placed the cause of physical
and mental distraction in the uterus (Neely, 47-48, 79-81)
Edward Jorden, a London physician
Page | 3
There is no consciousness
without discrimination of opposites.
The Phaedo’s account of the soul appears to render it genderless,

from which it would seem to follow that women’s souls
are identical in power and capacities to those of men.
Christia Mercer
… because women were defined in terms of their difference
from men, they were defined exclusively in relationship to
their sexual nature and reproduction.
Feminism Historicized
Like man, the Church assumed guardianship over women,

a condition that had the effect of eliminating her rights.
In return for protection, the Church required obedience.
… medieval theologians would have agreed with MacKinnon that women are defined as sexual beings, that
femininity is sexual, and that "heterosexuality is the structure of the oppression of women." Theologians, however,
would have thought that this was divinely inspired.
Jeanne L. Schroede
The new feminine ideal became Griselda, "the meek and

patient, the silent and tender sufferer, the pale reflection of the
Mater Dolorosa, submissive to every torture that her husband
could invent, but more submissive to the Church than her
husband".
Henry Adams's "Primitive Rights of Women": An Offense
against Church, the Patriarchal State, Progressive
Evolution, and the Women's Liberation Movement
David Partenheimer
The Female Malady?

Men, Women And Madness In Nineteenth Century Britain
Joan Busfield
What do cultural representations of madness, which are to be found in legal, medical and literary texts, as well as in
the visual arts, such as painting and photography, reveal about gender and madness? Showalter's argument is that in
the nineteenth century there was a marked cultural affinity between women and madness. Women, she contends, are
'situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse,
culture and mind' (1987:3-4). The feminine she asserts 'stands for the irrational in general' and this means that
'madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female
malady' (1987:4).
Feminists in the twentieth century began to understand female Page | 4

madness as an historical label applied to female protest.
Frailty, thy name is woman:
Depictions of Female Madness
Madness has been perceived for centuries metaphorically and symbolically as a feminine illness and continues to be
gendered into the twenty-first century
What we consider ‘madness,’ whether it appears in women or in men,
is either the acting out of the devalued female role or the total or partial rejection
of one’s sex role stereotype”.
Women and Madness,
Phyllis Chesler
Through a careful argument, Ortner concludes that women are more often equated with
nature and men with culture. …. Even in cultures where women are perceived as
transcending nature, such as when they take on more masculine roles like leadership, they
are perceived to be more rooted in nature than are men. So why, questions Ortner, are
women viewed in this way?
…. both a "dread of woman" and male envy

of the female have contributed to Freud's penis envy concept.
"What do men think that mothers want?"

Freud … explored ways in which men wish their mothers dead
and fear that their mothers harbor deadly desires. Freud's theories
thus "tell a story about men's fear of women and
the social consequences of that fear".
Analysis Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension
Diane Jonte-Pace
Homey explains that the man's incapacity for motherhood is probably

felt as an inferiority, which men displace onto women.
Homey argues that from the biological point of view, woman has in motherhood, or in the capacity for motherhood,
a distinct physiological superiority. This superiority is most clearly reflected in the unconscious male psyche in the
boy's intense envy of maternal abilities. Expression of this envy, for Homey, takes several forms: resentment toward
women, the tendency to devalue female functions of pregnancy and childbirth while overemphasizing male
genitality, and sublimation into cultural values. Masculine envy serves as one, if not the essential, driving force in
establishment of cultural values: "Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every
field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small role in the creation of living beings, which constantly
impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?"
"Matriarchy is followed by patriarchy and preceded by unregulated hetaerism." [93] The progress from the maternal
to the paternal conception of man forms the most important turning point in the history of the relations between the
sexes ... the triumph of paternity brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature, a Page | 5
sublimation of human existence over the laws of material life." [109] "By and large the decline in women's virtue
sets in when the men begin to look down on them, … The progress of civilization is not favorable to woman."
Aristotle and Woman

Maryanne Cline Horowitz
For Aristotle, woman needs man not only to form her children but also to form her decisions. The intermingling of
Aristotle's arguments that woman is subordinate to man with his arguments that woman should be subordinate to
man is nowhere more apparent than in his first book of the Politics: ... the freeman rules over the slave after another
manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul
are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative faculty
(bouleutikon) at all; the woman has, but it is without authority (akuron), and the child has, but it is immature.
… the arguments offered by prominent ancient philosophers

and medical theorists to justify the view that female bodies
are imperfect or “mutilated” compared to male bodies
from which it is supposed to follow that women are morally
inferior to men.
Christia Mercer
The medieval theologians saw woman's role in society as the instrument of

procreation: a wife, submissive to her husband who, because of his rational
impregnable nature, was her head.
Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in Contemporary

Feminist Jurisprudence
According to West, more recent feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin, have theorized that: [l]ike pregnancy, ...
intercourse is invasive, intrusive and violative, and like pregnancy it is therefore the cause of women's
oppressed, invaded, intruded, violated, and debased lives ... [Consequently,] [a]ccording to Radical Feminists,
women's longings for individuation, physical privacy, and independence go well beyond the desire to avoid the
dangers of rape or unwanted pregnancy.
Jeanne L. Schroede
… the uterus is prone to get sick, especially if it is deprived of

the benefits arising from sex and procreation, which, widening
a woman’s canals, promote the cleansing of the body.
Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health
Cecilia Tasca1, Mariangela. Rapetti1, Mauro Giovanni Carta and Bianca Fadda
According to Greek mythology, the experience of hysteria was at the base of the birth of psychiatry.
The Argonaut Melampus, a physician, is considered it founder: he placated the revolt of Argo’s virgins who refused
to honor the phallus and fled to the mountains, their behavior being taken for madness. Melampus cured these
women with hellebore and then urged them to join carnally with young and strong men. They were healed and
recovered their wits. Melampus spoke of the women’s madness as derived from their uterus being poisoned by Page | 6
venomous humors, due to a lack of orgasms and “uterine melancholy” [2-4].
Thus arose the idea of a female madness related to the lack of a normal sexual life: Plato, in Timaeus, argues that the
uterus is sad and unfortunate when it does not join with the male and does not give rise to a new birth, and Aristotle
and Hippocrates were of the same opinion [2-4].
Under the system of patriarchy, each household symbolized a small

kingdom, with the man acting as the king. Men held authority over
their entire family, including all property, … all institutions of
society, …
Feminism Historicized:
Jeanne L. Schroede
… women were defined in terms of their difference from men, they were
defined exclusively in relationship to their sexual nature and reproduction.
During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the resulting Catholic Counter-Reformation, the
depiction of women in domestic roles became increasingly important. The social system of patriarchy matured
during the early modern period, particularly during the Reformation. The concept of patriarchy involved male
control over nearly all facets of society. Men were considered central in every type of social structure. Under the
system of patriarchy, each household symbolized a small kingdom, with the man acting as the king. Men held
authority over their entire family, including all property that belonged to the family. Men ran all institutions of
society, including social, religious, political, economic, and legal. Over the course of the seventeenth century, men
increasingly had nearly absolute power over their unmarried and widowed female relatives, while women were
expected to be subordinate to men in every way.
"To be rapable ... defines what a woman is’ …

Isadore maintained that woman was soft and weak so that she had to submit to man's sexual aggression. "If a man
easily could be repelled by a woman, his lust might lead him to turn to his own sex for satisfaction." Bullough,
Medieval Medicine, supra at 489.
Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in

Contemporary Feminist Jurisprudence
Jeanne L. Schroede
The Development Of The Law Of Marriage

This radical change in marriage law and family structure seems to have started at the time that the economic power
and status of women in medieval society had reached its height. At the same time, the male nobility was wresting
control over wealth (in the form of dowries and inheritance rights) from women.
… "There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. This is the paternal

principle, the Logos, .... Therefore the first creative act of liberation is matricide, …
Page | 7
Historicized: Medieval
Misogynist Stereotypes in Contemporary
Jeanne L. Schroede
control over wealth (in the form of dowries and inheritance rights) from women.
The overthrow of the mother right was the world historical

defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home
also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she
became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the
production of children.
Medieval Misogyny
Misogyny is not so much a historical subject as one whose very lack of history is so bound in its effects that any
attempt merely to trace the history of woman-hating is hopelessly doomed, despite all moral imperative, to
naturalize that which it would denounce (more on this later).
Medieval Misogyny, R. Howard Bloch
Woman as Riot
In response to Sandor Ferenczi's assertion that the only advantage the woman ultimately has over the man is the
questionable pleasure in giving birth, … Homey argues that from the biological point of view, woman has in mother
hood, or in the capacity for motherhood, a distinct physiological superiority. This superiority is most clearly
reflected in the unconscious male psyche in the boy's intense envy of maternal abilities.
Expression of this envy, for Homey, takes several forms: resentment toward women, the tendency to devalue female
functions of pregnancy and childbirth while overemphasizing male genitality, and sublimation into cultural values.
Masculine envy serves as one, if not the essential, driving force in establishment of cultural values…
… Hostility toward the mother for men as adults is expressed as male domination of women. Men may also express
an unconscious desire to appropriate maternal functions in reaction to the early memory of being beholden to them
as infants. I suggest that envy and fear of maternal capacities in this way provide primordial motivations for men's
co-optation of female functions in the Eucharist and other blood sacrificial rituals.
In "Primitive Rights," Adams summarizes the scholarship

suggesting that Christianity had improved the lot of women:
Starting from the assumption that the wife was in origin a
slave, either by capture or by purchase, the commonly
received theory of her escape from this degradation assumed a
gradual rise in the moral standard of civilized society,
Henry Adams, "Primitive Rights of Women,"
Historical Essays, 1891

the mind of woman is always threatened with danger
Sir Almroth Wright Page | 8
… the uterus is prone to get sick, especially if it is deprived of

the benefits arising from sex and procreation, which, widening
a woman’s canals, promote the cleansing of the body.

Gendered Norms: Galen And The One-Sex Model

… the world’s perfection is such that the male human being will necessarily dominate, while the female will be
dominated. Were a woman to become dominant, the suggestion is, she would become male. The starkness of this
world for all those humans with internal genitalia is clear: the teleological perfection of nature and the human
flourishing within it necessitate that women be dominated. Masculinity and femininity, then, are conceived through
relationships of domination organized around active and passive roles.
The well-known Christian theologian and contemporary of Galen, Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 ACE), neatly
summarizes the point: “to do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.” This is an assumption that
grounds much of what Manne calls “the logic of misogyny.”
Feminists in the twentieth century began to understand female madness as an historical

label applied to female protest. Labeled “deviant,” Victorian women subverted the linear
logic of male science by expressing their opposition against the traditional feminine role
with physical symptoms (Showalter, Malady, 5).
“Frailty, thy name is woman”:

Seymour Haden, a prominent Victorian gynecologist, wrote in 1867:

“We, being men, have our patients, who are women, at our mercy.”
“We are the stronger, and they the weaker. They are obliged to believe
all that we tell them. They are not in a position to dispute anything we say to
them, and we, therefore, may be said to have them at our mercy.”
Society ladies drank vinegar or arsenic to give them a pallid look. Victorian fashion to a great
degree cultivated the frail and ornamental look; corsets were used simply to enhance the figure
and were debilitating to the extreme. Society women often succumbed to fainting, sunstroke, or
asphyxia due to all the clothing they had to wear. Women in the nineteenth century were put on a
pedestal but they were not worshipped.
Page | 9
Woman is, "indefinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason why she is called temperamental,
incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious”. Woman's discourse is "contradictory, words seem a little crazy to the
logic of reason, and inaudible for him who listens with ready-made grids, a code prepared in advance. ...
The Feminist Critique of Reason Revisited
Herta Nagl-Docekal
Mimicking an epileptic seizure, these fits often occurred with shocking suddenness. At
other times they “came on” gradually, announcing their approach with a general feeling
of depression, nervousness, crying or lassitude …
The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and the Role Conflict in 19th Century America
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

Juliana Little
Madness has been perceived for centuries metaphorically and symbolically as a feminine illness and continues to be
gendered into the twenty-first century. Works of art and literature and psychiatric medicine influence each other as
well as our understanding and perception of mental illness. Throughout history, images of mental illness in women
send the message that women are weak, dangerous, and require containment because we must control what we
perceive to be uncontrollable.
By the sixteenth century, women were shut away in madhouses by their husbands. Physicians began to argue that
some women accused of witchcraft were suffering from mental illness and it is this reassessment that began the shift
toward gendering madness as female. By the seventeenth century, special wards were reserved for prostitutes,
pregnant and poor women in France’s first mental asylum, the Salpêtrière. In the Victorian era, the model image of
woman emphasized the virtues of delicacy, purity, and domesticity and rejection of that ideal resulted in
psychological and physical problems. By the end of the nineteenth century, images of madness culturally executed
and enforced were primarily of women (Chesler, 74). Feminists in the twentieth century began to understand female
madness as an historical label applied to female protest. Labeled “deviant,” Victorian women subverted the linear
logic of male science by expressing their opposition against the traditional feminine role with physical symptoms
(Showalter, Malady, 5).
Predictably, hysteria was deemed related to a woman’s reproductive cycle and

any disordered uterus could “cause” hysteria; the condition was also thought be
a result of excessive sexual relations.

Hysteria, a characteristically female condition, (from the Greek, meaning “of the womb”), … Hysteria was most
frequent among middle- and upper-class women between the ages of fifteen and forty and commonly followed an
emotional or financial setback. Characteristics of the complaint were never fatal but never curable, vast and ever
changeable: weakness, headaches, nervousness, depression, crying, fatigue, or disabling pain. As a result, women Page | 10
would take to their beds as invalids, sometimes for years, sacrificing all familial duties and being cared for by a
relative (Smith-Rosenberg, Hysterical, 663).
The most dramatic and frightening symptom of the condition however, was the hysterical “fit.” Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg describes a typical attack in her essay, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and the Role Conflict in 19th
Century America”: Mimicking an epileptic seizure, these fits often occurred with shocking suddenness. At other
times they “came on” gradually, announcing their approach with a general feeling of depression, nervousness,
crying or lassitude…It began with pain and tension, most frequently in the “uterine area.” The sufferer alternately
sobbed and laughed violently, complained of palpitations of the heart, clawed her throat as if strangling and, at
times, abruptly lost the power of hearing and speech. A death-like trance might follow, lasting hours, even days. At
other times violent convulsions - sometimes accompanied by hallucinations - seized her body.
By the end of the nineteenth century, hysteria included virtually any symptom imaginable, such as fainting, heart
palpitations, vomiting, laughing then sobbing, as well as some rather alarmingly extreme: loss of sensation or
paralysis in areas of the body, sensation of choking, inability to swallow or loss of taste, smell, hearing, or vision
(Smith-Rosenberg, Hysterical, 662). Attacks of this nature would be followed by extreme exhaustion. Equally
frustrating and medically unexplainable was the rapid change in the hysteric’s symptoms. Anything was possible;
paralysis could shift from one limb to another, or contracture of a limb would shift to loss of voice, or the inability to
taste. Predictably, hysteria was deemed related to a woman’s reproductive cycle and any disordered uterus could
“cause” hysteria; the condition was also thought be a result of excessive sexual relations.
Many women, overwhelmed with domestic demands, did not wish to “get well.” Hysteria became an alternate role
option for those unable to accept their life situation. The sick woman’s countenance was not that far from what was
considered the ideal woman of the nineteenth century. The melancholic aesthetic that developed, where female
beauty and illness were linked, was actually a source of real illness and generally poor health. Society ladies drank
vinegar or arsenic to give them a pallid look. Victorian fashion to a great degree cultivated the frail and ornamental
look; corsets were used simply to enhance the figure and were debilitating to the extreme. Society women often
succumbed to fainting, sunstroke, or asphyxia due to all the clothing they had to wear. Women in the nineteenth
century were put on a pedestal but they were not worshipped.
Women were sharply discouraged from expressing competitive inclinations or asserting mastery in such "masculine"
areas as physical skill, strength, and courage, or in academic, scientific, or commercial pursuits. Rather they were
encouraged to be coquettish, entertaining, nonthreatening, and nurturing. Male religious writers and educators
forbade overt anger and violence as unfeminine and vulgar and they did not reward curiosity, intrusiveness,
exploratory behavior, in women. Indeed, when such characteristics conflicted with the higher feminine values of
cleanliness, deportment, unobtrusiveness, or obedience, they were criticized or punished. (Disorderly, 213)
Those who desired a life that did not include marriage, child-bearing, or other self-sacrifice were deemed “other”
and treated as such. It is therefore, not surprising that the consequence of this type of socialization was many women
with low self-esteem or those who suppressed their own needs to support the male figures in their lives. Some of
these women may have chosen to feign hysterical behavior. Others, who may have felt rage against systems in
which they were powerless, may have had legitimate illness arise from the stress and anxiety of living under such
oppression.

Juliana Little
Page | 11
The weaker link in the human couple is weaker not only in the capacity
to generate offspring but also in the capacity to generate decisions. For
Aristotle, woman needs man not only to form her children but also to
form her decisions.
Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in Contemporary

The nature of women was discussed purely in terms of how they differed from men. Feminine nature was conceived
as being the opposite of male nature: individualistic, selfish, cunning, and sexually voracious. In many cases female
stereotypes expounded by individual theologians seemed mutually inconsistent. Women were sexually voracious
and aggressive, yet sexually shy; women could not feel strong emotions like love, but they were too emotional;
women had no sense of morality, yet women were most ardent in insisting on justice (in the medieval form of
vendetta) to punish wrongs.
Jeanne L. Schroeder

Christia Mercer
Mariska Leunissen has argued, a close look at Aristotle’s biological writings reveals that “women, barbarians, and
‘natural slaves’ ” are ill-equipped to attain “full virtue and happiness.” The reason for this is that such “morally
unlucky groups” face too many natural obstacles. The obstacles that women face arise from the inferiority of their
bodies, an inferiority that infects all aspects of their lives and that follows neatly from Aristotle’s robust teleology
and the normativity with which it imbues nature.
Through a careful argument, Ortner concludes that women are more often equated with nature and men with culture.
…. Even in cultures where women are perceived as transcending nature, such as when they take on more masculine
roles like leadership, they are perceived to be more rooted in nature than are men. So why, questions Ortner, are
Patriarchy and the Power of Myth: Exploring the Significance of a Matriarchal Prehistory
Grace Varada Brandmaier
whereas sexually promiscuous (and blatantly aggressive or violent)

gods are described as “playful,” sexually promiscuous goddesses are
described as “improper,” “harlots,” and “void of morals.”

Christia Mercer
… the arguments offered by prominent ancient philosophers and medical theorists to justify the view that female
bodies are imperfect or “mutilated” compared to male bodies … These arguments rendered men superior to women
and justified the need for women to subjugate themselves to their procreative powers and to the wisdom of their Page | 12
superiors.
If patriarchy is the system by means of which men control women and,
in Kate Manne’s words, sexism is “the branch of patriarchal ideology
that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order” (Manne 2018,
20), …
And if misogyny is something like “the system that polices and enforces” patriarchy’s “governing norms and
expectations” (Manne 2018, 20), then these writings give rise to the norms and expectations within which hundreds
of generations of women have been - and still are - forced to navigate. The implications of these original arguments
continue to motivate today’s misogyny. As a historian of philosophy, I consider it valuable to recover the
foundations on which centuries of sexism and its accompanying misogyny were built. As a feminist, I find it
revelatory to bear witness to the means by which more than two millennia of sexism came to be enshrined. … many
of the ancient assumptions and arguments for female inferiority have persisted in some form or other since ancient
Greece and continue to support “the logic of misogyny” (Manne 2018). No wonder it is so hard to shed gender
prejudices.
The woman "is in every respect backward, lacking in reason

and reflection ... a kind of middle step between the child and
the man, who is the true human being. … In the last resort,
women exist solely for the propagation of the race."
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
The Phaedo’s account of the soul appears to render it genderless, from

which it would seem to follow that women’s souls are identical in
power and capacities to those of men.
Christia Mercer

Hippocrates (5th century BC) is the first to use the term hysteria. Indeed he also believes that the cause of this
disease lies in the movement of the uterus (“hysteron”) [2-4].
… For this reason, the uterus is prone to get sick, especially if it is deprived of the benefits arising from sex and
procreation, which, widening a woman’s canals, promote the cleansing of the body. And he goes further; especially
in virgins, widows, single, or sterile women, this “bad” uterus – since it is not satisfied not only produces toxic
fumes but also takes to wandering around the body, causing various kinds of disorders such as anxiety, sense of
suffocation, tremors, sometimes even convulsions and paralysis. Page | 13
The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while
women correspond to plants because their development is more placid .... When women hold the helm of
government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of
universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinion .... The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only
by the stress of thought and much technical exertion. Schopenhauer writes that woman "is in every respect
backward, lacking in reason and reflection ... a kind of middle step between the child and the man, who is the true
human being. … In the last resort, women exist solely for the propagation of the race." We also see evidence of the
attitude that woman is unfit for the life of the mind in the Supreme Court's decision in Bradwell v. Illinois. The
medical community made similar pronouncements about the unfitness of women for intellectual pursuits. These are
but isolated examples of a continuous tendency in our Western culture to define "woman" by an absence of
developed rationality or, at best, by an inferior capacity to reason.
A Platonist could consistently believe that all souls are equal in capacities, but that female bodies are harder for the
genderless soul to escape. Plato suggests something like this in the Timaeus, his mythic account of how the world
might have been created. There, the narrator spins a tale according to which the gods first created men and then
punished those “who lived lives of cowardice or injustice” by turning them into women in their next lives.11 That is,
the Timaeus suggests that women are a degraded state of humanity, a kind of punishment that results from improper
behavior. What about women’s bodies might make them so degraded?
To put it simply, the human female’s natural deficiency inclines them to be morally deficient. Unlike men who are
“more courageous,” women are less tenacious, more mischievous, and more impulsive. In Aristotle’s words,
because of her “softer disposition . . . the female is less spirited than the male” and so: a woman is more
compassionate than a man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time, more jealous, more querulous, more apt to
scold and to strike. She is furthermore more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of
shame, more false of speech, more deceptive . . . more difficult to rouse to action. … Given this natural inferiority,
it is appropriate for women to be overseen and regulated. “As regards the sexes,” writes Aristotle in the Politics,
“the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male the ruler and the female the subject.”
Gendered Norms: Galen And The One-Sex Model
… the world’s perfection is such that the male human being will necessarily dominate, while the female will be
dominated. Were a woman to become dominant, the suggestion is, she would become male. The starkness of this
world for all those humans with internal genitalia is clear: the teleological perfection of nature and the human
flourishing within it necessitate that women be dominated. Masculinity and femininity, then, are conceived through
relationships of domination organized around active and passive roles.
“to do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.”
Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 ACE)
Like man, the Church assumed guardianship over women, a condition that had the effect of eliminating her rights. In
return for protection, the Church required obedience. The new feminine ideal became Griselda, "the meek and
patient, the silent and tender sufferer, the pale reflection of the Mater Dolorosa, submissive to every torture that her
husband could invent, but more submissive to the Church than her husband" (p. 38).
Henry Adams's "Primitive Rights of Women": An Offense against Church, the Patriarchal State, Progressive
Evolution, and the Women's Liberation Movement
David Partenheimer
Page | 14
… "There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. This is the paternal
principle, the Logos, .... Therefore the first creative act of liberation is matricide, …

Herta Nagl-Docekal
Woman is, for Irigaray, "indefinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason why she is called
temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious" (1981, 103). Woman's discourse is "contradictory, words
seem a little crazy to the logic of reason, and inaudible for him who listens with ready-made grids, a code prepared
in advance.... It is therefore useless to trap women into giving exact definition of what they mean; to make them
repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear. They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery
where you claim to take them by surprise. ... If you inquire insistently as to what they are thinking about, they can
only reply: nothing. Everything" (1981, 103). Just as she associates the language of unity with the phallus, Irigaray
relates ambiguity to the female body.
That Irigaray searches for the origin of misogynist thought at the level of what she calls "Logos" has the
consequence that the problem of patriarchy is not closely addressed where it actually arises. What needs to be
scrutinized instead of the vague concept of Logos is the power discrepancy between the sexes-the fact that men still
have a supremacy in all spheres of life such that they also possess the privilege of definition. But shifting the
question from the socio-political level to the level of "Logos" also works against the strategy of overcoming
patriarchy that Irigaray proposes. Given the premise of Irigaray's Logos concept, there is only one available strategy:
to associate women with the counter-concept, that is, the irrational.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. … the paternal principle, the Logos, … Nothing can
exist without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one again in the end.”
The archetypes and the collective unconscious.
Four archetypes: mother, rebirth, spirit, trickster.
Carl Gustav Jung
Any study of misogyny must, it seems to me, begin from two

fundamental assumptions. The first is a recognition of the very real
disenfranchisement of women in the Middle Ages. Such a premise is
based upon careful work over the last fifteen years within the realm of
social history.
Medieval Misogyny
R. Howard Bloch
Misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment Page | 15
The roots of misogyny can be traced back to ancient Greek mythology.

The term “misogyny” is derived from the Ancient Greek word “mīsoguníā” which means hatred towards women.
Misogyny has taken shape in multiple forms such as male privilege, patriarchy, gender discrimination, sexual
harassment, belittling of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification. The roots of misogyny can be
traced back to ancient Greek mythology. According to Hesiod before women came into existence, men were
coexisting peacefully as companions to Gods until Prometheus decided to steal the secret of fire from the God which
angered Zeus. Zeus punished mankind with an evil thing for their delight called Pandora, the first woman who
carried a box which unleashed all evils such as labor, sickness, old age, and death.
Misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment
Kalpana Srivastava, Suprakash Chaudhury, P. S. Bhat, and Samiksha Sahu

According to Greek mythology,

the experience of hysteria was at the base of the birth of psychiatry.
We intend to historically identify the two dominant approaches towards mental disorders, the
“magicdemonological” and “scientific” views in relation to women: not only is a woman vulnerable to mental
disorders, she is weak and easily influenced (by the “supernatural” or by organic degeneration), and she is somehow
“guilty” (of sinning or not procreating). Thus mental disorder, especially in women, so often misunderstood and
misinterpreted, generates scientific and / or moral bias, defined as a pseudoscientific prejudice [1].
According to Greek mythology, the experience of hysteria was at the base of the birth of psychiatry.
The Argonaut Melampus, a physician, is considered it founder: he placated the revolt of Argo’s virgins who refused
to honor the phallus and fled to the mountains, their behavior being taken for madness. Melampus cured these
women with hellebore and then urged them to join carnally with young and strong men. They were healed and
recovered their wits. Melampus spoke of the women’s madness as derived from their uterus being poisoned by
venomous humors, due to a lack of orgasms and “uterine melancholy” .
Thus arose the idea of a female madness related to the lack of a normal sexual life: Plato, in Timaeus, argues that the
uterus is sad and unfortunate when it does not join with the male and does not give rise to a new birth, and Aristotle
and Hippocrates were of the same opinion.
Hysteria … affected women are advised not only to partake in sexual

activity, but also to cure themselves with acrid or fragrant fumigation
of the face and genitals, to push the uterus back to its natural place
inside the body.

Hippocrates (5th century BC) is the first to use the term hysteria. Indeed he also believes that the cause of this
disease lies in the movement of the uterus (“hysteron”).
… For this reason, the uterus is prone to get sick, especially if it is deprived of the benefits arising from sex and Page | 16
procreation, which, widening a woman’s canals, promote the cleansing of the body. And he goes further; especially
in virgins, widows, single, or sterile women, this “bad” uterus – since it is not satisfied not only produces toxic
fumes but also takes to wandering around the body, causing various kinds of disorders such as anxiety, sense of
suffocation, tremors, sometimes even convulsions and paralysis. For this reason, he suggests that even widows and
unmarried women should get married and live a satisfactory sexual life within the bounds of marriage.
However, when the disease is recognized, affected women are advised not only to partake in sexual activity, but also
to cure themselves with acrid or fragrant fumigation of the face and genitals, to push the uterus back to its natural
place inside the body.
However, for the doctors of that time, the uterus is still the organ that allows to explain vulnerable physiology and
psychology of women: the concept of inferiority towards men is still not outdated. Hysteria still remains the
“symbol” of femininity [26].
Between the 17th and 18th centuries a trend of thought that delegated to the woman a social mission started
developing. If from a moral point of view she finds redemption in maternal sacrifice that redeems the soul but it
does not rehabilitate the body, from the social point of view, the woman takes a specific role. In 1775 the physician-
philosopher Pierre Roussel published the treatise "Systeme physique et moral de la femme" greatly influenced by
the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Femininity is for both authors an essential nature, with defined functions, and
the disease is explained by the non-fulfillment of natural desire. The excesses of civilization causes disruption in the
woman as well as moral and physiological imbalance, the identified by doctors in hysteria. The afflictions, diseases
and depravity of women result from the breaking away from the normal natural functions. Following natural
determinism, doctors confine the woman within the boundaries of a specific role: she is a mother and guardian of
virtue. In this context, the woman-witch appears more and more an artifice to secure the social order of ancien
régime.
Medieval Misogyny
R. Howard Bloch
The discourse of misogyny runs like a rich vein throughout
the breadth of medieval literature. Like allegory itself, to which
it is peculiarly attracted, antifeminism is both a genre and a topos,
or, as Paul Zumthor might suggest, a "register"- a discourse
visible across a broad spectrum of poetic types.
Misogyny is not so much a historical subject as one whose very lack of history is so bound in its effects that any
attempt merely to trace the history of woman-hating is hopelessly doomed, despite all moral imperative, to
naturalize that which it would denounce (more on this later). This is not to imply that there have been no changes in
the ways misogyny has through time been received, understood, assimilated by particular cultures, implemented, or
pressed ideologically in the service of repressive social practice. Rather, it suggests that the very tenacity of the
topoi of antifeminism is significant in and of itself and, in fact, provides one of the most powerful ways of thinking
the phenomenon, since the extreme complexity of defining just what misogyny is remains indissociable from its
seeming ubiquity or from the essentializing definitions of woman apparent in the writings of just about anyone who
has touched the subject from Tertullian to Nietzsche.
Any study of misogyny must, it seems to me, begin from two fundamental assumptions. The first is a recognition of
the very real disenfranchisement of women in the Middle Ages. Such a premise is based upon careful work over the
last fifteen years within the realm of social history. Few would dispute, for example, that there were from the fourth
through the fourteenth centuries essential differences in men's and women's rights to possess, inherit, and alienate Page | 17
property; in their duties to pay homage and taxes; in their qualification for exemptions. To these are added
differences in men's and women's civil and legal rights: in the rights to bear witness, collect evidence, represent
oneself (or others) in judicial causes; to serve as judges or lawyers, as oath helpers; to bring suit or to stand for
election. Legal penalties for the same crime often differed substantially, as, for instance, in the punishments for
adultery, for bearing children out of wedlock, for beating one's spouse. Even the mode of execution was in certain
cases not the same for women as for men.
Further, in this account of the ad seriatim creation of the genders, woman is by definition a derivation of man, who,
as the direct creation of God, remains both chronologically antecedent and ontologically prior.
Medieval Misogyny,
R. Howard Bloch

Christia Mercer
… the arguments offered by prominent ancient philosophers (Plato and Aristotle) and
medical theorists (Hippocrates and Galen) to justify the view that female bodies are
imperfect or “mutilated” compared to male bodies from which it is supposed to follow
that women are morally inferior to men. These arguments rendered men superior to
women and justified the need for women to sub-jugate themselves to their procreative
powers and to the wisdom of their superiors.
… a pattern in which any loss or fear of loss has the potential to trigger
anxiety about the maternal body; Misogyny, a kind of repetition compulsion.
Only a deep understanding of our propensity to retreat to
Misogyny in time of crisis can help us transcend this pattern.
Diane Jonte-Pace
The weaker link in the human couple is weaker not only

to generate in the capacity offspring but also in the capacity to generate decisions.
Aristotle and Woman

... the freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the
man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. For
the slave has no deliberative faculty (bouleutikon) at all; the woman has, but it is without authority (akuron), and the
child has, but it is immature.
Page | 18
Homey explains that the man's incapacity for motherhood is probably
felt as an inferiority, which men displace onto women.
Homey argues that from the biological point of view, woman has in motherhood, or in the capacity for motherhood,
a distinct physiological superiority. This superiority is most clearly reflected in the unconscious male psyche in the
boy's intense envy of maternal abilities. Expression of this envy, for Homey, takes several forms: resentment toward
women, the tendency to devalue female functions of pregnancy and childbirth while overemphasizing male
genitality, and sublimation into cultural values. Masculine envy serves as one, if not the essential, driving force in
establishment of cultural values: "Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every
field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small role in the creation of living beings, which constantly
impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?"
The Unfinished Project of J .J. Bachofen and

the Gender Wars on the Home Front
Marsha R. Robinson
"Matriarchy is followed by patriarchy and preceded by unregulated hetaerism." [93] The progress from the maternal
to the paternal conception of man forms the most important turning point in the history of the relations between the
sexes ... the triumph of paternity brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature, a
sublimation of human existence over the laws of material life." [109] "By and large the decline in women's virtue
sets in when the men begin to look down on them, … The progress of civilization is not favorable to woman."
Aristotle and Woman

For Aristotle, woman needs man not only to form her children but also to form her decisions. The intermingling of
Aristotle's arguments that woman is subordinate to man with his arguments that woman should be subordinate to
man is nowhere more apparent than in his first book of the Politics: ... the freeman rules over the slave after another
manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul
are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative faculty
(bouleutikon) at all; the woman has, but it is without authority (akuron), and the child has, but it is immature.
The Psychologizing of Menstrual Cycle-Related Symptoms

Women, Wombs, Health, and Reason
Sydenham’s new definition of ‘hysteria’ was in keeping with preexisting philosophical assumptions that women
were inherently physically, spiritually, and intellectually inferior to men. Yet it meant that gender discrimination
was thus now justified by a ‘scientific’ (that is, supposedly objective) medical claim that due to the pathological
nature of the female (reproductive) body, women were also pathologically emotional (and, therefore, less capable of Page | 19
reason) and so inevitably subject to the control of men (Ussher 2005, 16).
By the late nineteenth century, the work of Sigmund Freud had firmly repositioned ‘hysteria’ as a type of
psychological neurosis (Freud 1966). His work significantly influenced early twentieth century public discourse.
Indeed, one of the main arguments used against women’s suffrage (the right to vote in parliamentary elections) was
that (all) women were mentally unfit to make an informed and rational decision. Just such a belief was
unambiguously conveyed by Sir Almroth Wright (1912), a famous physiologist and anti-suffragist; “[On] Militant
Hysteria - No doctor . . . can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger

Herta Nagl-Docekal
Woman is, for Irigaray, "indefinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason why she is called
temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious" (1981, 103). Woman's discourse is "contradictory, words
seem a little crazy to the logic of reason, and inaudible for him who listens with ready-made grids, a code prepared
in advance.... It is therefore useless to trap women into giving exact definition of what they mean; to make them
repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear. They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery
where you claim to take them by surprise. ... If you inquire insistently as to what they are thinking about, they can
only reply: nothing. Everything" (1981, 103). Just as she associates the language of unity with the phallus, Irigaray
relates ambiguity to the female body.
At this point, let's reconsider Irigaray's motives. Her concern is to expose how the roots of patriarchal thought can be
traced ever deeper, even into language as such. … "Irigaray questions the structures of logic in which the female as
concept has been suppressed, then displaces the whole system.... She attempts to leave behind the conceptual
universe of the Logos and its symbolic policeman, the phallus" (Burke 1994, 45).
That Irigaray searches for the origin of misogynist thought at the level of what she calls "Logos" has the
consequence that the problem of patriarchy is not closely addressed where it actually arises. What needs to be
scrutinized instead of the vague concept of Logos is the power discrepancy between the sexes-the fact that men still
have a supremacy in all spheres of life such that they also possess the privilege of definition. But shifting the
question from the socio-political level to the level of "Logos" also works against the strategy of overcoming
patriarchy that Irigaray proposes.
Given the premise of Irigaray's Logos concept, there is only one available strategy: to associate women with the
counter-concept, that is, the irrational. However, to choose this option means to take on the traditional image of the
feminine developed under patriarchal conditions. Scholars following Irigaray's lead counter this objection-already
frequently raised-by pointing to the difference between the symbolic feminine and the "real" women. But it needs to
be taken into account that Irigaray stresses the irrational with the intention of overcoming the alienation of female
sexuality, and thereby of the entire self-understanding of "real" women. Certainly: Irigaray deviates from the
traditional cliche in that she revalorizes irrationality. But what does this achieve? Irrationality is both a theoretical
and a practical dead end.
Through a careful argument, Ortner concludes that women are more often equated with
nature and men with culture. …. Even in cultures where women are perceived as Page | 20
transcending nature, such as when they take on more masculine roles like leadership, they
are perceived to be more rooted in nature than are men. So why, questions Ortner, are
Nancy Jay and a Feminist Psychology of Sacrifice

Kelley Ann Raab
Homey speculates that both a "dread of woman" and male envy of the female have contributed to Freud's penis envy
concept. She points out that although the genital difference between the sexes has always been made the cardinal
point in analytic conception, the other great biological difference between the sexes-the different parts played by
men and women in the function of reproduction-has been left out of consideration.
In response to Sandor Ferenczi's assertion that the only advantage the woman ultimately has over the man is the
questionable pleasure in giving birth, Homey asks: [W]hat about motherhood? And the blissful consciousness of
bearing a new life within oneself? And the ineffable happiness of the increasing expectation of the appearance of
this new being? And the joy when it finally makes its appearance and one holds it for the first time in one's arms?
And the deep pleasurable feeling of satisfaction in suckling it and the happiness of the whole period when the infant
needs her care? Homey argues that from the biological point of view, woman has in mother hood, or in the capacity
for motherhood, a distinct physiological superiority. This superiority is most clearly reflected in the unconscious
male psyche in the boy's intense envy of maternal abilities.
Expression of this envy, for Homey, takes several forms: resentment toward women, the tendency to devalue female
functions of pregnancy and childbirth while overemphasizing male genitality, and sublimation into cultural values.
Masculine envy serves as one, if not the essential, driving force in establishment of cultural values: "Is not the
tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a
relatively small role in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in
achievement?" Homey explains that the man's incapacity for motherhood is probably felt as an inferiority, which
men displace onto women. Can it not be expressed also in the unconscious desire for feminine identification?
Homey does not directly address this possibility. Yet, in his introduction to Horney's book Feminine Psychology,
Harold Kelman gives several examples of the male desire to be female, as found in the research of G. Bose,
Margaret Mead, and Bruno Bettelheim.
… Hostility toward the mother for men as adults is expressed as male domination of women. Men may also express
an unconscious desire to appropriate maternal functions in reaction to the early memory of being beholden to them
as infants. I suggest that envy and fear of maternal capacities in this way provide primordial motivations for men's
co-optation of female functions in the Eucharist and other blood sacrificial rituals.

this pattern.
Diane Jonte Pace
Page | 21
… both a "dread of woman" and male envy of

the female have contributed to Freud's penis envy concept.
Unconsciousness is the primal sin, evil itself, for the Logos.

Therefore the first creative act of liberation is matricide,
… "There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. This is the paternal principle, the Logos, which
eternally struggles to extricate itself from the primal warmth and primal darkness of the maternal womb, in a word,
from unconsciousness. Divine curiosity yearns to be born and does not shrink from conflict, suffering, or sin.
Unconsciousness is the primal sin, evil itself, for the Logos. Therefore the first creative act of liberation is matricide,
and the spirit that dared all heights and depths must, as Synesius says, suffer the divine punishment, enchainment on
the rocks of the Caucasus. Nothing can exist without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one
again in the end.”
Four archetypes: mother, rebirth, spirit, trickster.
Carl Gustav Jung

Analysis Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension
Diane Jonte-Pace
Freud … explored ways in which men wish their mothers dead and fear that
their mothers harbor deadly desires. Freud's theories thus "tell a story about
men's fear of women and the social consequences of that fear".
On rare occasions, and with hesitation, Freud discusses death fantasies in relation to the mother, rather than the
father, exploring matriphobic and misogynist fears and fantasies: fears of the mother, desires for her death, and
fantasies of immortality. These Freudian explorations of matriphobia and matricide do not represent misogyny on
Freud's part. Rather, they represent analyses and interpretations of psychological and cultural misogyny.
… on the themes of death, immortality, and the afterlife, revealing in Freud's texts, in addition to an Oedipal theory
of patricidal fantasies, a set of images involving dead mothers, mothers as instructors in death, and "uncanny"
(unheimlich) maternal bodies. Freud's analysis of "the uncanny" as a term which "comes to mean its opposite" is
pivotal for the counterthesis. Death, immortality, and the mother's body are all described as "(un)canny": Freud used
similar terminology to describe the fantasy of a heavenly afterlife, a "home in the uncanny," and the genitals of the
mother, an "uncanny home."
"What do men think that mothers want?" A careful analyst of male fantasies and fears about the desires of women
and mothers, Freud was not unsuccessful at answering these questions. Although he insistently stated that men
harbor fantasies of death toward their fathers and sexual desires toward their mothers, he also, almost unwillingly,
inadvertently, or unconsciously, explored ways in which men wish their mothers dead and fear that their mothers
harbor deadly desires. Freud's theories thus "tell a story about men's fear of women and the social consequences of
that fear" (Todd 1986: 528).
Page | 22
The Female Malady?

Joan Busfield
What do cultural representations of madness, which are to be found in legal, medical and literary texts, as well as in
the visual arts, such as painting and photography, reveal about gender and madness? Showalter's argument is that in
the nineteenth century there was a marked cultural affinity between women and madness. Women, she contends, are
'situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse,
culture and mind' (1987:3-4). The feminine she asserts 'stands for the irrational in general' and this means that
'madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female
malady' (1987:4).
Showalter argues that the cultural association of madness and femininity is a nineteenth-century development. The
wild, dark, and often naked male madness of the eighteenth century, … taken from Charles Bell's Essays on the
Anatomy of Madness, which was not actually published until 1806, is transformed into a more youthful, gentle,
perhaps beautiful, female face. This transformation of the face of madness is assumed to be associated with the
spread of Romantic thought.
Both lay and medical thinking perceived and constructed a highly differentiated landscape in which madness did not
exclusively take on the cloak of one gender or the other, but took many forms.
Feminism Historicized
Most significantly, because women were defined in terms of their difference from men, they were defined
exclusively in relationship to their sexual nature and reproduction.
As the Middle Ages progressed, ideas of individuality and privacy developed. Initially, this developing emphasis
was perceived as feminine values and instruments of feminine liberation against the patriarchal feudal system. ...
The demise of the hierarchical and patriarchical structures can be seen in the working out of the role of consent in
sexual relationship, as shown in theories of the definition of marriage and rape, and in the ideals of chastity and fear
of sexual pollution.
The Development Of The Law Of Marriage

control over wealth (in the form of dowries and inheritance rights) from women. Unfortunately, but predictably, by
the late Middle Ages the new marriage law was accepted by secular society; individuality was recognized as a more
positive, "masculine" value. Women had been largely privatized-relegated to the house and family to be admired for
nurturing and motherhood-and women's economic and political status began to fall throughout the high Middle
Ages. Agnatic lineage replaced cognatic lineage and the noblewoman's importance in her family declined.
Feminism Historicized: Medieval

Jeanne L. Schroede
Page | 23
The Female Malady?

Joan Busfield
Feminists have been taken to task for suggesting both that the higher level of mental illness observed in women is a
consequence of the oppression they face - an oppression which drives them into madness and mental disorder - and
also that he concept of mental illness is a social construct inappropriately and incorrectly applied to women by a
patriarchal order as a means of social control. … the two positions are not in fact incompatible.
On the other hand they tend to see the labelling of women as mentally ill as evidence of patriarchal power - of the
powerlessness of women in the face of male authority, especially of the male-dominated medical profession
(Chesler 1972; Ehrenreich and English 1979).
There is, Sedgwick argues, a fundamental ambivalence here. In one formulation mental illness is accorded an
important experiential reality - it is a condition which reflects the inequalities and exploitation that exist in
contemporary society and the oppression of women in particular: it is a product of women's disadvantageous social
situation, and, indeed, a measure of it.
Gender, labelling and psychiatry

Theoretically the argument that the comparatively high levels of mental illness observed in women is evidence of
the patriarchal power exercised over women - of the powerlessness of women in the face of male authority -
represents a feminist development of the arguments put forward by the critics of psychiatry of the 1960s -
the so-called anti-psychiatrists such as Thomas Szasz (1961a;1963) (though he explicitly rejects that label
(1981:355) R.D. Laing (1967) and T.J. Scheff (1966).
Phyllis Chesler, a feminist, in her influential book Women and Madness (1972) developed the theme of the damage
that can be perpetrated by psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions but applied it specifically to women. Chesler
argues that women's behaviour is typically devalued, rejected and pathologised: 'women, by definition, are viewed
as psychiatrically impaired - whether they accept or reject the female role - simply because they are women'
(1972:115). It is primarily for this reason that women are overrepresented in mental patient populations." And as
patients women have to face the world of psychiatry: a world numerically dominated by men, which
shares and acts upon 'traditional myths about "abnormality", sex role stereotypes and female inferiority' (1972:61)
and which mirrors female experience in patriarchal society.
First, that historically as medicine successfully professionalized itself women were largely excluded from positions
of power and authority in the hierarchy of healers, though not from healing, curing and caring per se. There is,
therefore, a dimension of patriarchy in medical practice when women are patients, using the term patriarchy here as
a descriptive term to refer to male power, not the rule of the father. The dimension of patriarchy enhances the
dependency of women as patients (Barrett and Roberts 1978; Roberts 1985).
Indeed, as Chesler (1972) and others (Kimball 1975; Smart 1976; Al-Issa 1978) have suggested, women seem to be
in something of a double bind, since conformity to role expectations puts them closer to behaviours which are
defined as pathological by overall standards of adult behaviour, whilst rejection of these same expectations may
itself be judged pathological.
The third important point is that defining women as mentally ill not only creates a situation of dependence on the
medical profession, a largely male-dominated profession even now, especially in the upper echelons, but also helps
to ensure that little is done to focus on the situational aspects of their problems. This is not something that is specific
to women; however, since many more women than men now receive treatment for psychiatric complaints it is of Page | 24
especial importance to them.

this pattern.
Diane Jonte Pace
"There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.

… Therefore the first creative act of liberation is matricide, ... Nothing can exist
without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one again in the end".
Four archetypes: mother, rebirth, spirit, trickster. Carl Gustav Jung
A briefe discourse of a Disease Called

the Suffocation of the Mother - 1603.
"Suffocation of the Mother" (the term “mother” being an antiquated usage of uterus) or strangulatus uteri, as
different from bewitchment and asserted that there were natural causes for insanity and placed the cause of physical
and mental distraction in the uterus (Neely, 47-48, 79-81)
Edward Jorden, a London physician
A woman coming from a man’s rib is reverse birth - creation of woman by man. There is power in creation and she
argues that there was probably a political motivation for power and control underlying this mythology (Stone, 219).
The myth of Eve’s betrayal was, according to Stone, designed to continue the suppression of the goddess religion
even after a historical shift occurred (Stone, 198).
Three claims are made here. First, Irigaray argues that symbolic gods play a crucial role in relation to human
identity. In fact, she claims that man is "able to exist" because of his identification with a masculine-paternal God
(Irigaray 1993a, 61). Second, she argues that no divinity, and no other symbolic figure in Western culture plays an
equivalent role for women. Third, she interprets the absence of a specifically feminine "divinity" as contributing to
the atrophied state of women's identity, subjectivity, and community. Consequently, if a culture of sexual difference
is desired, one in which women were not "cut... off from themselves and from one another" (Irigaray 1993a, 64), one
necessary factor would be the generation of a feminine divine.
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women - Luce Irigaray on Divinity
Penelope Deutscher
Page | 25
Animus and Anima

Emma Jung
Confronted with ... the animus the woman's task is to create a place for it in her life and personality, and to initiate
some undertaking with the energy belonging to it … Only when this masculine entity becomes an integrated part of
the soul and carries on its proper function there is it possible for a woman to be truly a woman in the higher sense,
and, at the same time, also being herself, to fulfill her individual human destiny."

dangers of rape or unwanted pregnancy. Women also long for liberation from the oppression of intimacy (and its
attendant values) which both cultural feminism and most women officially, and wrongly, overvalue. Intimacy, in
short, is intrusive, even when it isn't life threatening (perhaps especially when it isn't life threatening).
A study of medieval theology and jurisprudence suggests that, whether or not radical feminists are correct in
characterizing intercourse and pregnancy as invasive and violative by their very nature, and whether or not
contemporary masculine discourse is incapable of expressing the reality of contemporary feminine violation, they
are incorrect if they postulate this understanding as being uniquely and essentially feminine and foreign to male
thought. Rather, the violative and pollutive nature of intercourse and pregnancy was not merely a widely held
masculine experience, it was a major tenet underlying the canon law of sex and marriage.
In addition, the degrading and oppressive effect on women of heterosexual intercourse and pregnancy was expressly
recognized by male theologians.
… medieval theologians would have agreed with MacKinnon that women are defined as sexual beings, that
femininity is sexual, and that "heterosexuality is the structure of the oppression of women."196 Theologians,
however, would have thought that this was divinely inspired.
dangers of rape or unwanted pregnancy. Women also long for liberation from the oppression of intimacy (and its
attendant values) which both cultural feminism and most women officially, and wrongly, overvalue. Intimacy, in
short, is intrusive, even when it isn't life threatening (perhaps especially when it isn't life threatening).

Jeanne L. Schroede
The patriarchal culture was under attack by women demanding change; a natural defense was to claim that because
women were ruled by their bodies and therefore unfit for anything other than a domestic role, deviance from this Page | 26
was associated with hysteria and mental disorder. Anti-suffrage propagandist cartoons declare the mental instability
and criminality of these women, since it was deemed much easier to tolerate hysteria than to allow changes to the
social order such as legal rights for women.
In nineteenth-century literature, madness became an important theme as an expression of suppressed rebellion; the
image of the “madwoman” has mirrored the oppression of feminine potential, her symptoms seeming to critique the
society that oppresses her.

the mind of woman is always threatened with danger
Sir Almroth Wright
Masculinity and femininity, then, are conceived through relationships of domination organized around active and
passive roles. The well- known Christian theologian and contemporary of Galen, Clement of Alexandria (150–215
ACE), neatly summarizes the point: “to do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.”51 This is an
assumption that grounds much of what Manne calls “the logic of misogyny.”
Christia Mercer
Feminism Historicized: Medieval

Jeanne L. Schroede
Women simply must define themselves, and not merely accept men's definitions of them as the opposite or
complement of men. A feminism historicized embraces this recognition as a step toward feminine freedom and a just
jurisprudence for both sexes.
Page | 27
… there can be no reshaping of women's identity and
subjectivity and indeed of culture in general, without
reshaping our conceptions of divinity.
The Only Diabolical Thing about Women –
Luce Irigaray on Divinity
Penelope Deutscher

Suffocating The Mother

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“To do is the mark of the man; to suffer is the mark of the woman.

” - Clement of Alexandria (150–215 ACE)

"To be rapable ... defines what a woman is’ …

If the above title seems redundant, it is because the topic of

Only a deep understanding

[On] Militant Hysteria –

First, man is "able to exist" because of his identification

A Briefe Discourse Of A Disease Called

The Phaedo’s account of the soul appears to render it genderless,

Like man, the Church assumed guardianship over women,

The new feminine ideal became Griselda, "the meek and

The Female Malady?

Feminists in the twentieth century began to understand female Page | 4

…. both a "dread of woman" and male envy

"What do men think that mothers want?"

Homey explains that the man's incapacity for motherhood is probably

Aristotle and Woman

… the arguments offered by prominent ancient philosophers

The medieval theologians saw woman's role in society as the instrument of

Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in Contemporary

… the uterus is prone to get sick, especially if it is deprived of

Under the system of patriarchy, each household symbolized a small

"To be rapable ... defines what a woman is’ …

Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in

The Development Of The Law Of Marriage

… "There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. This is the paternal

The overthrow of the mother right was the world historical

In "Primitive Rights," Adams summarizes the scholarship

[On] Militant Hysteria –

… the uterus is prone to get sick, especially if it is deprived of

Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health

Gendered Norms: Galen And The One-Sex Model

Feminists in the twentieth century began to understand female madness as an historical

“Frailty, thy name is woman”:

Seymour Haden, a prominent Victorian gynecologist, wrote in 1867:

“Frailty, thy name is woman”:

Predictably, hysteria was deemed related to a woman’s reproductive cycle and

“Frailty, thy name is woman”:

“Frailty, thy name is woman”:

Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in Contemporary

The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny

whereas sexually promiscuous (and blatantly aggressive or violent)

The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny

The woman "is in every respect backward, lacking in reason

The Phaedo’s account of the soul appears to render it genderless, from

Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health

The Feminist Critique of Reason Revisited

Any study of misogyny must, it seems to me, begin from two

Misogyny, feminism, and sexual harassment Page | 15

The roots of misogyny can be traced back to ancient Greek mythology.

Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health

According to Greek mythology,

Hysteria … affected women are advised not only to partake in sexual

Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health

The Philosophical Roots of Western Misogyny

The weaker link in the human couple is weaker not only

Aristotle and Woman

The Unfinished Project of J .J. Bachofen and

Aristotle and Woman

The Psychologizing of Menstrual Cycle-Related Symptoms

The Feminist Critique of Reason Revisited

Nancy Jay and a Feminist Psychology of Sacrifice

Only a deep understanding