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The 10 Reasons Men Put Women In Asylums Are Still Too Familiar
We don’t lock women up now, but the reasons we did still echo
In a shadowy corner of the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Illinois, a woman stared out the bars of the tiny window. Three years she’d been in there.
Listening to women cry and beg to go home.
Her baby would be walking now. Wouldn’t know her anymore.
When the men burst into her house, picked her up fighting and screaming, she thought her husband was teaching her a lesson for arguing. Stay a few days, he’d bring her back home, she thought. But when the trunk of her clothing arrived she knew. She was there to stay. It’s a true story.
All it took to commit a woman to an asylum was the signature of two doctors — or one man if he was her husband, father or brother.
The West Virginia Division of Culture & History has a list of 125 reasons women were put in asylums starting in 1840. Behaviors men didn’t like. We don’t lock women up like we used to. But if you look at the reasons?
They still sound way too familiar.
1. Diagnosis: Hysteria
What it meant: You’re a woman, so your uterus is making you crazy.
