Are you a woman who cares about following her dreams, not toeing the line? Do you speak your mind? Do you not feel particularly inclined to obey your husband or father in every little matter, agree with all of their ideas about religion or educating your kids, look meek, and behave "properly" at all times? Society always throws up a lot of roadblocks for women who want to break from oppressive gender norms — but women in the 19th century who spoke up and pushed back against sexist oppression faced a distinctly awful possibility: being locked away in mental institutions, which at the time were generally known as "asylums."

No, sadly, I'm not kidding; a unique and awful combination of misogynistic ideas about women's minds, concern about "moral contagion," and a lack of real knowledge about mental health led to thousands of women being imprisoned in asylums (with many famous ones among them, including Lincoln's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln) — for reasons that these days would barely raise an eyebrow.

The trend of locking women in asylums was so widespread that Nellie Bly, the pioneering journalist, made her name by getting herself committed to a women's asylum, and reporting on abuses and mistreatment from the inside in 1887. But the real horror isn't just the way many women in asylums were abused — it's how they ended up in there. To be thrown in an asylum for the crime of, say, protesting your husband's affair with your niece was a real thing that happened — and a thing that happened not all that long ago.

If you're deep into watching The Handmaid's Tale and terrified, worried about the future of women's rights, or simply curious about the ways past generations punished women who wanted more than their era saw fit to give them, read on and learn about what used to happen to women whose greatest crime was likely unconventionality.

Committing Women Was Thought To Help Families "Preserve" Their "Honor" Hugh Welch Diamond The notion of "hysteria" — that uniquely female complaint that was supposed to be caused by wandering wombs and general female nervous system delicacy — was one of the great reasons that women were committed to asylums in the 19th century. And one of the most prominent of the hysteria diagnosticians was Jean-Martin Charcot, who managed the now-infamous La Salpêtrière asylum for the insane in France from 1870 onwards. The idea of hysteria has been around for millennia, and was often thought to be down to improper sexual health (often staying a virgin "too long") or to the excellently-named condition of "uterine fury;" its symptoms as outlined by Charcot included nervousness, fits, anxiety and "unusual" behavior — symptoms that covered a lot of extremely average behavior. Perversely, though they often disrupted or ruined the lives of the women involved, hysteria diagnoses and asylum stays were seen as a method to preserve family honor in the 19th century. As the London Psychiatric Hospital explains: "For hysterical women and their families, the asylum offered a convenient and socially acceptable excuse for inappropriate, and potentially scandalous behaviour. Rather than being viewed as a bad and immoral woman, honour and reputation could be maintained by the diagnosis of a medical condition and commitment to an asylum." Once in La Salpêtrière, women were often given extraordinary treatments for the cure of their "hysteria" — some just odd, and some incredibly painful. They'd be photographed in the midst of hysterical "fits" for Charcot's teaching classes, and treated with everything from amyl nitrate to compressing the ovaries (one "ovarian compressor" was applied to a patient for 36 hours with no results) and cauterization of the cervix.

Postpartum Depression Was Not Treated With Sympathy Gustave Joseph Witkowski These days we're developing more awareness about postpartum depression —including how incredibly common it is — but in the 19th century, the condition then called "puerperal insanity" was a broad brush used to describe both women who were genuinely suffering from PPD as well as many women who were likely just traumatized by the era's brutal methods of childbirth and the high rates of maternal and child death. By 1850, apparently, a full 10 percent of all women admitted to asylums in the UK were deemed to be suffering from the disorder, which was believed to manifest as everything from "raving madness" to slight depressive states, and was largely thought to be down to the weakness of female nerves when dealing with the intensity of childbirth and its horrors.