The Cambridge Dictionary defines hysteria as “extreme fear, excitement, anger, etc. that cannot be controlled.” This is the modern definition of the word; until 1980, hysteria was considered a mental illness. Moreover, this was exclusive to women.
Female hysteria, which I will just be referring to as hysteria for this paper, is the belief that women are illogical. There was an extensive range of symptoms including emotional tantrums to fainting and hallucinations. This caused women who were dealing with serious mental issues not to be taken seriously enough, women who were just having a bad day to be labeled as crazy. Treatments for hysteria included things like hypnosis or a rest cure, which forced women to go on bed rest for as much as eight weeks with no outside interaction.
In this paper, I will analyze how the mental health of women was not being taken seriously simply because they were women. Despite the much progress made in the psychology industry in general, women still deal with desensitization of their emotions. This all ties back to the idea of hysteria.
Hysteria can be traced back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. However, for the sake of time and the word count of this essay, I will start with the twentieth century and work my way to how this is relevant today.
During WWI, 1914-1918 a mental ailment came around called war neurosis. You more likely know it as shell shock. Symptoms of shell shock included delirium, headaches, and an inability to walk or sleep. Soldiers of the war were mentally and physically affected by what they saw and experienced. It made sense; the men were seeing death daily. Of course, they were traumatized.
It was not neglected that these symptoms were reminiscent of those of hysteria. When shell shock was first heard of, the men who faced it weren’t accepted. They were called weak and unfit for war. But, as the number of men experiencing shell shock increased, so did the number of people taking it seriously.
But, it wasn’t just the soldiers. Women worked in the war as nurses or ambulance drivers. In the article The Forgotten Female Shell-Shock Victims of World War 1 by Hannah Groch-Begley, she mentions how diaries were written by women who worked in the war detailing the many things they went through. Some experienced being trapped in No Man’s Land,—the land in between the trenches—and others were being harmed by the fumes of gasses that were “clinging to the victims they were helping” These experiences ended up in women showing signs of shell shock. However, female shell shock was largely ignored and the women who suffered were not being diagnosed or treated. “If a female ambulance driver or nurse could not stand the strain of war, she was simply sent home.”
I want to take your attention away from the war front and focus on the civilians of WWI. Enter Elizabeth Huntley. Huntley is a rather infamous figure in WWI history. Groch-Begley spends some time in her article talking about Huntley and her experience.
“In late 1917,“ she writes, “a British woman named Elizabeth Huntley decapitated her own daughter. […] her friends and family testified that she had been a ‘jolly-hearted woman‘—that is, ‘until the air raids.‘“ Huntley was starting to experience symptoms like delusions after the air raids started. It sounds like, although not a soldier, Huntley began to go through shell shock herself.
So, what did it mean? Men were facing symptoms of hysteria, while women were going through shell shock. This led to the development of “civilian war neurosis“a condition that reinforced “a dichotomy between the home front and the war front.“ Civilian war neurosis served as an acknowledgment that people who were not actively serving in the war could be psychologically affected by it. “Medical authorities were willing to admit that those not directly in the line of fire—such as Huntley—were susceptible to the traumas of warfare, but were unwilling to completely equate the mental sufferings of soldiers and civilians.” Information on female mental health during the WWI era is still very undocumented, except for stories like Huntley’s.
According to PubMed Central, “Hysteria was in fact a major form of neurotic illness in Western societies during the 19th Century and remained so up to World War II.” After WWII, hysteria started to decline in favor of the study of “depressive and anxiety neuroses” as well as the development of somatic and dissociative disorders. Today, someone who was said to have hysteria would most likely be diagnosed with a dissociative disorder.
Hysterical neurosis was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Hysteria has only been unofficial for 44 years. Conversion Disorder replaced it. According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, “Conversion disorder (also known as functional neurological symptom disorder) is a condition in which a person experiences physical and sensory problems, such as paralysis, numbness, blindness, deafness, or seizures, with no underlying neurologic pathology.” Today, hysteria and the symptoms related to it are treated with cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapy, and for some, medication can also be helpful. Conversion disorder also has nothing to do with simply being a female.
It is my belief that hysteria still has an imprint on society. Hysteria was still a diagnosis 60 years after the Women’s suffrage movement, and the movement itself was seen to be led by hysterical women. Throughout history, women have been seen as unfit for many things. And the reason for most of it is that they are perceived to be too emotional, or prone to overreacting.
In this digital age, it is more than obvious that there are some who still believe in the idea of women being hysterical. It doesn’t take long while scrolling through social media apps like TikTok or Instagram especially to see comments completely attacking a woman for doing virtually anything. A woman cannot express hardship, happiness, or even confusion without a “woman moment” comment, or a man being rude or ignorant. Another thing we see online are these male-led podcasts seen mostly on TikTok and YouTube shorts that slander women.
For example, the Fresh&Fit podcast, which had over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, claims to “provide the TRUTH to men on females,” On their subchannel FreshandFitClips, the owner of the podcast, Myron Gaines shares that he thinks “women are inherently lazy.”
This idea can even be seen in the medical field. There are stories of doctors who will quickly dismiss a woman’s pain, writing it off as being tired or a period symptom. On the web page titled Is Misdiagnosis an Epidemic Among Women? written by Megan Cline and published by MedMalFirm, it is shown that “Research done in 2016 found that women have a much greater chance of being misdiagnosed than their male counterparts.” Women are more likely to be overlooked after having a stroke by 30%. In the case of a heart attack, that number rises to 50%—factors like doctors seeing women as emotional, or the lack of proper unbiased research on female health cater to these types of mistakes.
There is the case of 26-year-old Fai Limbaugh. She was on KATU news for sharing her struggles with her lack of diagnosis on TikTok. She “believes she has endometriosis, a disease where tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus.” The condition itself is under-researched, having no known cause or cure. Limbaugh has dealt with doctors telling her that there isn’t anything wrong with her and that the immense pain that she experiences is just “part of being a woman.” This is not the only time a woman has been neglected like this. Dr. Melissa Pendergrass, an endometriosis specialist at Legacy Health says that she thinks “‘women’s pain has been normalized for way too long,’” According to Pendergrass, it can take up to 12 years to be properly diagnosed, and by then, the disease has likely spread.
In another case—the case of Natalie Stack, who was also on KATU news—a woman was told that the way to cure her pain was to get pregnant. This is actually very reminiscent of treatments for hysteria before the 20th century. But after she got a proper diagnosis, she was told that she was actually infertile.
My own mother has been through an experience like this as well. She sought help for pain and after a night of throwing up multiple times in the emergency room (and the doctors actually seeing a homeless man before seeing her), she was told that she was having cramps and sent home. After driving herself to her primary care doctor, a woman, she was told that her appendix had burst, which is something that can be fatal.
Not only is the idea that hysteria has imprinted on society insensitive, it can be extremely dangerous. The belief that women are overactive or emotional can lead to women staying in abusive and dangerous relationships. It can cause a misdiagnosis of a serious, life-altering problem.
It’s past time that we get over this outdated way of thinking. It is so important that we start to validate women more, and also, as women, to validate ourselves. It is our job to speak up about issues that we face, and let people know of our experiences so that maybe someone else who’s going through it will get the courage too as well. Thank you for your time.
Author’s Note:
My piece was inspired by an assignment I did in middle school. I had to write an essay for the National History Day competition in 9th grade (2023-2024), and Female Hysteria was something I both had experience writing with and a topic I was very interested in. As I go through high school, I’ve gotten increasingly more inclined to write about women’s rights and the way society views us. Being a black girl in America (who wants to go into journalism), now is more time than ever to share my voice.
Laci Harris | 16 | Baltimore, MD
