Insanity defense

“ . . . in ascribing their crimes to individual mental illness the legal system, the medical profession, and the press colluded in a process of delegitimizing both the defendant and her crime. Acquitting a woman on ground of insanity may have save her . . . but it also stripped her crime of meaning (Ainsley, 47). . . . The insanity acquittal turned the women concerned from agents who made decisions about their situations and then acted upon those decisions . . . into helpless victims of their emotions and bodies [puerperal mania, etc.], and transformed threatening and dangerous women into patients who could be confined, subdued and cured of their illness . . .” (48).