'The Yellow Wallpaper': historical materials

The bordom and confinement of affluent women fostered a morbid cult of hypochondria - referred to as 'female invalidism' - that began in the mid 19th century, and lasted up to the early 1910s. Sickness pervaded upper- and upper-middle-class female culture.

The association of TB with innate feminine weakness was strengthened by the fact that TB is usually accompanied by an erratic emotional pattern in which a person may sometimes behave frenetically, sometimes morbidly. The behavior characteristic for the disease fit expectations about woman's personality, and the look of the disease suited - and perhaps helped to create - the prevailing standards of female beauty. The female consumptive did not lose her feminine identity, she embodied it: the bright eyes, the translucent skin, and red lips were only an extreme of traditional female beauty.

The doctors' views of women as innately sick did not, of course make them sick, or delicate, or idle. But it did provide a powerful rationale against allowing women to act in any other way. Medical arugments were used to explain why women should be barred from medical school (they would faint in anatomy classes), from higher education altogether, and from voting.

But it was the field of gynecological surgery that provided the most brutally direct medical treatments of female 'personality disorders'. And the surgical approach to female psychological problems had what was considered a solid theoretical basis in the theory of 'the psychology of the ovary'. After all if the woman's entire personality was dominated by her reproductive organs, then gynecological surgery was the most logical approach to any female psychological problem.

(From Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. New York: Feminist Press, 1973)