Form and Content
Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness is a feminist indictment of the male-dominated psycho-medical establishment. Chesler examines the gender-based power relations in psychology and psychiatry from many perspectives and uses many tools: statistical studies, transcripts of interviews, quotations from many sources, personal reminiscences, charts and graphs, illustrations, extensive (almost chatty) footnotes, tales from classical mythology, and free speculation. Throughout her investigation, she consistently finds that women have been oppressed by the power of male definitions of mental health and mental illness, of treatment and cure.
Chesler divides her book into two sections, “Madness” and “Women.” In the first section, she considers the role of “madness” in the lives of four famous female mental patients: Elizabeth Packard (1816-c.1890), Ellen West (c.1890-1926), Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948), and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). In trying to live authentically—faithful to her own light in terms of religion, artistic creativity, or simple physical energy and adventurousness—each of these women ran afoul of gender-based societal expectations and consequently found herself in the power of men in the psychiatric industry. Once identified as “patients,” the women were then coached, coaxed, and coerced to mend their ways and return to the path of compliant wifedom. Chesler finds mental asylums, and most psychotherapy, to be bureaucratized extensions of the patriarchal family, carrying out the will of husbands of mostly female patient populations. Using epidemiological studies done by others, she demonstrates that the standard for mental health in Western society is not the same for men and women and that it is unfair to women.
In her first section, Chesler not only offers statistics and actual life stories of historical figures but also introduces Jungian tools: She recruits mythic presences into her discussion. She examines the figures of Demeter and her daughters, the Virgin Mary, and Joan of Arc for the ways in which they embody certain constellations of typical female experiences.
The second section of the book is dominated by the results of Chesler’s informal interviews with sixty women. Her interview subjects were selected to represent five distinct groups: women who have sex with their therapists, who are confined to mental hospitals, who are lesbians, who are members of ethnic minority groups, and who are feminists in therapy. In each chapter concerning these issues, Chesler briefly describes the demographics of her interview group, gives transcripts from her interviews, and presents some general discussion of her results. She is careful to point out that her study population was not randomized, and she makes no claim that her interviews describe anything except the subjective experience of the group of women that she interviewed. From her eclectic, personal, and openly adversarial feminist perspective, Chesler raises many questions and advances many conclusions about the psychiatric establishment. In general, she finds that in a male-dominated society, treatment of the forms of deviance that are termed “mental illness” is necessarily patriarchal. In other words, male-dominated psychiatry and psychology stand to serve the tense and oppressive power relations that exist between men and women. Sex-role stereotypes exist for both men and women, but Chesler finds that women are allowed a much narrower margin of deviation from role than men before society labels them “mad.” “Madness,” according to Chesler, may consist in either going too far in acting out the devalued female role (passivity, indecisiveness, frigidity, or depression) or in rejecting one’s sex-role stereotype altogether and venturing to show traits that are considered appropriate for the other gender.
Context
In the early 1970’s, when Chesler’s book appeared, there was a tremendous popularization of psychotherapy. The most significant impact of Women and Madness was to open this...
(This entire section contains 399 words.)
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territory of psychiatry and psychotherapy for feminist exploration. By 1972, a number of biographical and autobiographical works had already appeared to detail individual women’s struggles with insanity and the label of “insanity,” notably Nancy Milford’sZelda (1970) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1971). What was still lacking, however, was a broader discussion that would identify common patterns in these personal stories and situate them in a general social context. It was this gap that Chesler sought to fill with Women and Madness.
The book’s publication was greeted with extremely mixed reviews, and it was not only opponents of feminism who quarreled with its stance. Chesler’s exhortation that women take power was seen by some as a call to adopt the ways of the oppressor, instead of doing away with oppression—to simply substitute male madness for female. Some claimed that she romanticized madness itself and failed to distinguish between being identified as mad by others, feeling oneself to be mad, and truly being mad in some objective sense. Others criticized the book’s emphatic attack stance, which failed to address the idea of reforming the field of psychiatry. The patchwork nature of the text—with epidemiological data loosely stitched to personal narrative and mythology to polemic—seemed to some critics poorly edited. Some accused her of misinterpretations and frank errors in her statistics. In addition, as was almost obligatory with feminist writers of the period, her tone was called “strident.”
In spite of such criticism, Women and Madness was an influential book. Turning a feminist eye on the psychiatric industry was a productive move, even if the fruit that it bore may have been more polished in later hands. Chesler’s idiosyncratic and personal style in the book, while striking some readers at the time as slapdash, actually became part of a new trend of relinquishing the pretense of impersonal objectivity, the pose of standing apart and separate from the subject of study. Quite apart from its place in general historical trends is the role that this book has played in the lives of many individual women who have found it a comfort and a catalyst in their own struggles with mental health institutions in the United States.
