ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses gynaecological literature with its increasing stress on the dominance of the female reproductive system. It investigates the way in which psychiatric accounts in turn translated these assumptions into theories relating female insanity to the reproductive cycle. The evolution of medical views on their physical and psychological nature created an image of women as frail and unstable. Just as the democratic challenges of the Enlightenment had earlier resulted in a medically based construction of gender dichotomy, so the ‘feminist’ challenges of the mid- and late nineteenth century produced in gynaecology and psychology a more intensive dualism. If these views had been accepted, it would have meant that the world of the intellect was construed as a male preserve while women were confined within their biological straitjacket. Women were sensitized to this weight of professional opinion about their alleged frailty and the limitations that this might be expected to impose on lifestyle and aspiration.
