Puerperal Insanity

“Whether on a conscious or unconscious level, women who suffered from puerperal insanity were rebelling against the constraints of gender. The symptoms clearly indicate that rebellion. . . . women suffering from puerperal insanity were not acting like women at all. . . . Rebelling against cultural notions of ‘true womanhood’ was the one thing tying together the various symptoms of puerperal insanity. Physicians . . . made these rebellious symptoms legitimate by defining them within a medical framework . . . with a name: puerperal insanity. That naming was the result not only of the general ideas of the culture and the specific professionalization struggles of physicians, but also was related to doctors’ new relationship with women patients: as birth attendants. . . . The medicalization of pregnancy, birth and lactation provided a kind of permission for women to express rebellion and desperation in the particular symptoms of puerperal insanity. . . . Women played out their rebellion against the male physician, and doctors translated that rebellion into an acceptable medical category. But doctors also ‘cured’ the rebellion with their treatment and systematically silenced women in their case study reporting. In both cases, women were unequal partners in the construction of the disease” (Theriot III, 81-82).