It didn’t even take hysteria. Here’s that famous list from the late 1800′s of reasons women were admitted to a mental institution:

Notice that among the fairly reasonable ones we have things like “Imaginary female trouble” “Novel reading” “Over action of the mind” “Bad habits and political excitement” “Greediness” and various offenses of masturbation.

And of course it’s only the word of the family that had these women committed these “conditions” were as bad as they seemed to think. Often women were committed just to get them out of the way if they were too rebellious or stepping out of their place.

…though being me I can’t help but snicker at the “parents were cousins” one.







And even hundreds, thousands of years before this men were saying things like, oh that woman is probably upset just because her womb is knocked out of alignment or something.