Since racism is as deep, as complicated, and as absolutely evil a factor in American society as is sexism, I decided to view the Third World women shown in Table 1 as a separate group—regardless of any differences in their class origins, educational backgrounds, political beliefs, sexual preferences, and types of psychiatric experience. For a similar reason, I viewed all the (white) lesbians shown in Table 1 separately, regardless of any differences in class origins, political beliefs, types of psychiatric experience, etc. These two decisions, which I made beforehand, and for strictly ideological reasons, were fruitful ones.
Looking at Table 1, it is evident that these fifty-four women were experts about the “mental illness” profession. Nearly half of the women (N=26) are or were legally married at least once. Nearly a fifth of them (N=12) have children. Twelve of the forty women in the non-feminist categories expressed some feminist awareness or defined themselves as feminists (one of the SWT women; seven of the lesbians; two of the MA women, and two of the TW women). They had seen a total of 136 therapists and “averaged” (by category) between three and four therapists apiece. By category, they had remained in private therapy from about two years to more than four years.
Table 1: Fifty-four Women: Some Comparative Information Regarding Their Psychiatric Hospitalization and Private Psychotherapeutic Experiences: 1945–1971
N = Number of women
Av. = Average
Mode = Number most frequently given
Tot. = Total number of therapists
They were also experts about mental asylums: twenty-four of the women had been psychiatrically committed at least once, ten for suicide attempts and five for depression. They had been hospitalized from a minimum of about four months to a maximum of about sixteen months. The average duration in hospitals for all of the twenty-four hospitalized women was about a year. However, individual variation was very great. Some women had been hospitalized only once for a relatively brief period (for two- or three-month “stretches”); still others had been hospitalized a few times for very long periods (five years or more.) By category, the women had been in private hospitals (white middle- and upper-class enclaves) from a minimum of about two months to a maximum of about eight months; in both general psychiatric wards and state hospitals from a minimum of about two and a half months to a maximum of about ten months; and in state hospitals alone from a minimum of three months to a maximum of nearly two years.
In terms of private therapy, all of the women had seen about as many female as male therapists. However, with only one important exception, they had remained in treatment at least twice or three times as long with male as with female therapists. The important exception here are the Third World women, who stayed in therapy longer with female than with male therapists, and whose total duration in therapy was shorter than that of any other group. Among white women, the lesbians saw female therapists for the longest average time period (twenty-one months). The feminists remained with female therapists for an average of nineteen months. However, both the lesbians and the feminists still saw male therapists for twice as long a period as they saw female therapists.
Table 1 may be viewed in terms of my concept of a female career as a psychiatric patient—a career whose shape is influenced by the extent to which the “feminine” role is accepted or rejected, as well as by the woman’s age (or “expendability”), race, class, and marital status. For example, let’s look at the age at which the women were first committed to asylums. Lesbians were committed at the youngest age (when they were twenty-one) of any group. What is perceived (and experienced) as an extreme rejection of one’s “feminine” role is the most stressful and dramatically punished of all female offenses in our society. Let’s compare the “psychiatric patient careers” of the least “feminine” of the women—the lesbians—with those of the most “feminine”—the SWT women. (I am defining “femininity” mainly in terms of dependence on a man.)
The SWT women had committed a dramatic version of father-daughter incest—a sine qua non of “femininity” in patriarchal society. Nine of the eleven SWT women were legally married at least once before therapy while only one of the nine lesbians had ever been heterosexually married. The psychiatric careers of the SWT women reflect their “femininity” in several ways:
(1) They remained in therapy (a marriage-like institution) longer than any other group (for an average of fifty-one months, seven months longer than the lesbians did). For SWT women, going to therapy both reflected the problems they were having with their “feminine” role and provided another way of acting out that role. The fact that lesbians remained in treatment for the second longest period of time (for an average of forty-four months) underlines the extent to which therapy is a culture for both female accepters and female rejectors of the “feminine” role—and how similarly socialized both types of women are.
(2) Fewer of the SWT women were ever psychiatrically committed at all; four of the eleven SWT women (less than one-third) were hospitalized, as compared with six or two-thirds of the nine lesbians. It is important to note that two of the four SWT women were committed right after, and one during, their “affairs” with their therapists. Here we may remember in what ways clinical as well as societal bias rewards “femininity” in both psychiatric and social settings—up to a certain point—as long as the woman is young and/or attractive. The totally attractive “feminine” woman is not usually hospitalized. (She may still be “depressed” or “anxious” without being incarcerated for it.)
(3) Not only were the lesbians psychiatrically committed at an earlier age, but they remained in asylums for a total average of more than three times as long as the SWT women (for an average of ten months compared with an average of three and one-half months).
Perhaps one can argue that the SWT women were simply “caught” (Table 1) at an earlier stage of their patient “careers.” When they grow older their patient careers may resemble those of the MA women and may involve even greater hospitalization periods than those of the lesbians. The SWT-type woman may get so “depressed” or “anxious” that she will have to be treated for these extreme expressions of “femininity.” However, I don’t think this is true. For example, the ages of the SWT women at the time I interviewed them ranged from twenty-five to fifty; the MA women ranged in age from nineteen to seventy. I think we’re dealing with two different kinds of women. The SWT women may be “unhappy” but they remain committed to a “feminine” ideal throughout their lives. As such, they are not as stressed or punished by the fact and meaning of psychiatric hospitalization—as the lesbians are. The lesbians, in turn, for a number of reasons, are not as trapped into a hospitalized psychiatric career as are the MA women. Here we may remember the various studies that found greater “mental health” among single than married women. Of course, what is usually measured as “mental health” is male characteristics—some of which economically independent women (or women independent of men) would exhibit more than economically dependent women would.
The mental asylum (MA) women in Table 1 were first committed at the oldest average age of any of the groups (when they were twenty-nine years old). These eleven women probably reflect the scores of women on the national level who begin filling the psychiatric wards in general, state, and private hospitals when they reach their thirties. They have already had patient careers in private or outpatient clinic treatment during their twenties. Now, no longer “young,” they are both more desperate and more “expendable.” By this age they are stressed either by marriage and children—or by being unmarried and childless. Four of the eleven MA women were legally married, and two had children. Of the two women who were hospitalized for the longest time period, one was a single white woman and the other a very much married Puerto Rican mother. Psychiatric hospitalization is perceived by them as an escape from and as deserved punishment for their desperation, unhappiness, etc.
Third World women remained in private therapy for the shortest time period of any group, for an average
of twenty-five months. They were also the only group who remained in treatment longer with female than with male therapists. The simplest explanation for both these facts is that of poverty. Third World women couldn’t easily afford the white middle-class luxury of “feminine” father-worship. This is not to say they didn’t want to see male therapists or didn’t want to remain in therapy for longer periods. Six of the nine TW women interviewed saw (and wanted to see) male therapists; only one saw only female therapists; two saw both male and female therapists. The three women who saw female therapists saw agency or hospital social workers or pre-doctoral psychologists. It was at a price they could afford: it was free. Explanations other than “poverty” to account for the comparatively short therapy duration among TW women would include: the fact that, for better or worse, TW women are not as well “trained” for careers as psychiatric patients as are white women (although they are better “trained” than TW men); the fact that they mistrust, fear, and have no easy access to a professional world that is usually threatening, unsympathetic, and unable to “cure” them; the fact that some of their family and friendship needs are satisfied within the ghetto culture—as long as they are willing to remain within it, on its terms.
Only three of the TW women I interviewed were hospitalized—too small a number to reveal anything conclusive about the comparative effect of race and sex on the frequency or duration of hospitalization. It is possible that female psychiatric patient careers are primarily white and/or middle-class phenomena. Third World women are hospitalized, controlled, and commit suicide in many other ways: in jails; in medical experimentation mistreatment, and neglect; in doomed attempts to be treated as “white.” I will discuss this more fully in Chapter Eight.
Table 1 seems to suggest that feminists are never psychiatrically hospitalized or, as Shulamith Firestone has suggested in The Dialectics of Sex, that feminism is the cure for all the female disorders described by Freud. Actually, six of the twenty-four feminists were hospitalized: five were lesbians who became feminists after their hospital experiences. They are not shown as feminists in Table 1. The fourteen non-hospitalized (white) feminists ranged in age from twenty to forty-five and were mainly involved in the culture of private therapy. They saw therapists for a total average of more than three years. Among white women, feminists remained in therapy with female therapists for the second longest time period—for an average of nineteen months.
There are many other inferences to be drawn from the information in Table 1. I will not draw any. Instead, I would like to discuss each of the interviews in greater depth, beginning with the most unambivalently “feminine” of the women—those who had sexual relations with their therapists.
1.“Demeter.” Marble statue from the sanctuary of Demeter at Cnidos. Ca. 350–340 B. C.
2.“Pluto and Proserpina” by Bernini, 1621–22
Modern women are psychologically starved for nurturance and role-models, i.e., for female heroines and protective goddesses. It is significant that mothers and daughters have been minimized or totally excluded as primary figures in Judeo-Christian mythology. Demeter and Persephone were the central figures of a mother-daughter religion—the Eleusinian mysteries—in ancient Greece. Demeter is the goddess of life, corn, or grain. Her daughter Persephone (Demeter’s own virgin-self) is abducted and raped by Pluto, god of the underworld (or possibly Zeus or Dionysus, either of whom, according to myth, may have been Persephone’s father). In great sorrow and anger, Demeter refuses to let any crop grow until her daughter is returned to her. Finally, Persephone is allowed to remain with her mother for most of the year (spring, summer, and autumn), and with her husband during winter, when no crops can grow. While Demeter protects and “saves” her daughter, Persephone is still denied uniqueness and individuality. Both women still symbolize the sacrifices of self that biology and culture demand of women; both women represent a rape-incest-procreation model of sexuality.
3.“Joan of Arc and Judith” from the manuscript executed in Arras in 1451 by Martin leFranc—Le Champion des Dames
Some women, in states of madness, identify with Joan of Arc, the not-so-legendary Maid of Orleans, and with the Catholic Madonna. These two figures are the modified Christian equivalents of the pagan goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Joan is the only Persephone who is not kidnapped into marriage or impregnated. She never becomes a mother. She avoids the Demeter-mother and Persephone-daughter fate. She is our only remembrance of Amazonian culture. However, Joan is still ritually sacrificed as a source of male renewal—not through pregnancy and motherhood, but through her military victories for a male sovereign, and her subsequent political persecution—and canonization. Since Joan does not live in Amazon society, she is doomed to lead a male, rather than a female, army.
4.“The Entombment” by Fra Bartolommeo
Unlike Demeter, the Catholic Mary has no daughter. Her only contact with divinity is through her “servicing” of men: be it the Holy Father or her own son. Catholic mythology, as shown in Fra Bartolommeo’s painting, symbolizes the enforced splitting of woman into either mother or whore—both of whom nurture, worship, and ultimately mourn a dead man and/or a divine male infant. Like many women, Mary foregoes sexual pleasure, physical prowess, and economic and intellectual power in order to become a mother. Sigmund Freud has said that: “A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; that is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships.”
5.“The Annunciation” by D. G. Rossetti
6.“The Alba Madonna” by Raphael
Rosetti has painted a very young Mary—a somewhat terrified, trapped, and asexual girl, whose cross of sorrow, self-sacrifice, and service begins with the news of her forthcoming divine pregnancy. Unlike the pagan Demeter, Athena, or Diana, the Madonna is usually portrayed as physically undeveloped and maternally “beautiful”—as only a contented, gracious, and somewhat matronly mother can be to the male oedipal eye (as in Raphael’s “The Alba Madonna”). Interestingly, the Madonna often grows younger as her son grows older until, in Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Rome “Pietà,” she is idealized as the eternal Virgin Mother, and looks young enough to be her son’s bride. The Madonna is the primary role-model in Christian culture.
7.Insane Asylum: Crowded ward of the New York Lunatic Asylum, Blackwell’s Island, 1868
Elizabeth Packard (Chapter One) was hospitalized by her husband against her will in 1860 in a private asylum that probably looked like this. Violent women, terrified women, suicidal women, women being driven mad by the hospital itself—all crowded together in a physically and psychologically humiliating setting. Women have probably always constituted the majority of patients in private hospitals. Nelly Bly, an American journalist, admitted herself to the Blackwell Island asylum in 1887, in order to write an exposé, which appeared in the New York World. Periodically, exposés of mental asylums and criminal prisons have appeared in American newspapers, but neither institution (like the institution of the family upon which they’re patterned) has disappeared or been substantially reformed.
8.France’s oldest mental asylum, the Salpetrière, reserved special wards for old and indigent women, prostitutes, pregnant women, and young girls. While the total number of female and male patients in state asylums has steadily decreased (due to drug therapy, outpatient facilities, and the increasing usage of old-age homes), the percentage of patients who are “old” women in state asylums has just as steadily increased. An “old” woman even more than an “old” man, is a useless “thing,” an object of scorn, mockery, pity, and neglect.
9.This photo was taken in a mental hospital. The players in the drama are as old as the witchcraft trials: distant, condescending, potentially benevolent but all-powerful male Doctor-Inquisitors; a subservient female Nurse-Handmaiden; and a female Patient-Witch “possessed” by unhappiness, powerlessness, and dependence.
10.“Artemis and Iphigenia,” reconstruction by Studniczka
Artemis, or Diana, the virgin huntress, is Apollo’s twin sister. Unlike Athena or Aphrodite, her “mother” is not a man, but a woman. Artemis is reportedly always attended by sixty ocean nymphs and twenty river nymphs. According to one myth, Artemis rescues Iphigenia from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon. Artemis is a lesbian figure of Amazon origin. The only way her father, Zeus, can seduce her female lover Callisto is by assuming Artemis’ form.
11.“The Conversation,” sculptor unknown
These two women are strongly sensual, familiarly so, with each other, but not in a way that particularly appeals to male (or female) pornographic fantasies. They seem to be there for each other—and not as objects either to quell male fears of impotence or entrapment, or to excite male rape-lust.
Women and Madness Page 21