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Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England

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(This is a comparative essay I wrote on "Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England and Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood called Silencing Shakespeare's Sisters: Science and Society).

"It was thus I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path....The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding"

She was neither allowed to walk on the grass, nor allowed into the halls of academia, including the library as readers later find out, solely because she was a woman, an independent woman at that, and not a man. Because of men's newly proclaimed science and ancient traditions, men viewed education as destructive to a woman's energy and purpose in society.

During her life, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came to be an author of both fiction and nonfiction, including the vignette above from A Room of One's Own (1929). Most importantly, she was a feminist, who critiqued society's mores with reference to the differences between the two sexes--just as scholars do today. Like many of her successors, Woolf rightly believed that sexual differences were trivial, certainly in intellectual matters. Woolf specifically thought that any honest person was androgynous: having both male and female characteristics. To many individuals these sexual differences actually represented reality. Woolf further hypothesized that if William Shakespeare (1564-1616) had been a woman or had had a female sister of exactly identical intellect, she probably would have neither been provided opportunities to write, nor have been remembered because she belonged to the female sex. His symbolic sister represents all of the women who, like Woolf, have been unjustifiably silenced for thousands and thousands of years. Traditional history has long neglected herstory; only in the past sixty years or so have scholars slowly rediscovered and celebrated the past achievements of women.

During the European Renaissance and Reformation (c. 1400-1600) and during the Enlightenment (c. 1700s) as society underwent numerous rebirths, transformations, and upheavals, people searched for some kind of order, reason, and definition in their lives. Frequently, explorers, ministers, painters, and poets, for example, provided various answers to these questions for the newly emerging modern world. Significantly, scientists, all or virtually all white European males, also provided powerful answers to these questions using so-called new and more credible evidence and methods. Science acquired a new, extraordinary power. Many of the most powerful and long-lasting scientific discoveries discussed in this essay occurred during the Victorian (1837-1901) and Edwardian (1901-1910) eras. Most twenty-first-century contemporaries studying these movements inevitably see a sustained, direct link between the ancient socially prescribed status of men as superior and women as inferior and these varyingly successful scientific discourses. These discoveries also justified treating so-called savages as inferior individuals. A few exceptional individuals such as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) publicly supported equality for females; although, he still supported inferior treatment for those people not living in a so-called civilization.

Science was and is very much a cultural and social construction. According to these constructions and expectations reinforced by science, women were not to study, read, write, speak in public, or even think because of their fragile nature. This dogma only truly began changing in the twentieth century. Far too often science and society have silenced Shakespeare's sisters.

Learned Professor of History at Yale University, Cynthia Eagle Russett's (1937- ) Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1989), traces the efforts by male scientists to prove woman's inferiority. During this same time, women were seeking more autonomy. In fact, historiographically, Russett is the first scholar to compile Victorian justifications for a woman's inferiority compared to her male counterpart, in a single volume. Although her book is a synthesis, it remains a goldmine of primary sources because the voices of that era that disseminated unequal treatments for men and women are emphasized. While she does not have a thesis per se, her Sexual Science clearly demonstrates how science is a social construction. She focuses especially on European countries and the United States where "science became a weapon."

This weapon polarized men and women. Russett opens with a background chapter called "How to Tell the Girls from the Boys." Through new and developing branches of natural and social sciences, such as physical anthropology, scientists sought to measure and classify every part of a person's anatomy, biology, physiology, and psychology, including the brain and skull through craniology and phrenology. Through their discoveries, scientists increasingly focused on men's and women's biological limitations. Scientists argued that women had smaller, lighter, and underdeveloped brains when compared to male brains, which were bigger, heaver, and developed brains with a much greater potential. Even when evidence seemed to prove women were more capable in some areas, science sometimes simply rejected the findings. Upon discovering, for example, that women were more efficient readers, researcher Francis Galton (1822-1911) concluded that the experiment was not valid to test intelligence. Science used such reasoning as this, too: "Negroes were the shortest-trunked of all. Hence shortness of truck could not be a mark of superiority." Russett's book proceeds with further such discussions of males and females according to recapitulation, variability, labor, and energy.

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) furthered theories of recapitulation, which stated that each individual represented the life history of that race. European males, of course, represented the highest, most developed human possible. Savages and women stopped growing too soon, thus needing European males to care for them. This theory not only justified the subjugation of women, but it also justified the newly established imperialism and older systems such as raced-based plantation and urban slavery. Women were "repositories of both ontogenetic and phylogenetic human traits." In terms of recapitulation, women who sought intellectual activities rather than maternal fulfillment were endangering the entire race and its advancement. Moreover, girls were not to receive education beyond knowing how to be a proper mother. The science of recapitulation said that women had to be carefully watched because of their deviant behaviors and morals. Women, as they had been for centuries, were to be mothers, not laborers or thinkers. Surprisingly and without explanation, Russett concludes this section and others with an odd comment. For example, "Most students of sex differences were more discreet; they were careful to balance women's disabilities with their strengths." She does not focus on anyone who was discreet.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) provided a recognized solution as to why women lagged behind men: greater male variability. This theory stated that womankind contained fewer idiots (Russett's term) and fewer or no geniuses. Even the "best" women would "never become Edisons," according to this theories. A typical woman was average and not that different from all other women; thus, women were also denied individuality. But, why was this the case? I believe Russett misses a key point at this juncture. The theory of greater male variability allows "rich," "smart," "white," European men to justify why they existed and were allowed to create and circulate these theories. Obviously, according to all of their other theories and rigid social structures, the European male elite did not feel that poor white Europeans were their equal counterparts. Additionally, their elitist theories denouncing women and others required an explanation as to why all white European males were not perfect, rich, and smart. They needed to account for white European males who did not fit their mold, such as the homeless and criminal; the social construction of the scientific theory of greater male variability provided a solution. This pseudoscience, then, allowed men to justify their elite existence and to explain why women, savages, and substandard European men deserved to be written off as inferior, all in a neat package. Masculinity, further, was glamorized because of men's increased diversity and the chances masculinity allowed for men to be extremely smart or extremely dumb. Furthermore, this pseudoscience condemned all of Shakespeare's sisters before they were born. Men could work toward improvement under the greater male variability thesis; whereas, women were stuck in an evolutionary, biological, permanent second place.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), among others, studied the physiological differences between men and women. In the most primitive, savage societies, Spencer and his colleagues, as incredible as it may seem, said that there were no physiological difference between men and women. Slowly and forever, men and women would become different and more and more different at that. Men and women would always be "increasing [in their] complexity, differentiation, and specialization." Men would become more manly; women would become more womanly. All the while, women and men would become more dependent on each other. Whether or not a society was civilized could be determined by whether the women worked, as these sexual differences included the increasing specialization and division of labor. Partly representing its status as a social construction, this conjecture ignores the fact that working-class women have virtually always found working vital to live in any society. Likewise, carried to the logical extreme, women would eventually become literally incapable of moving or even of living.

Janet Oppenheim (1948-1994), formerly Professor of History at American University, studied the history of women, science, and Britain. Her "Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (1991) accepts the existence of real nervous disorders, but it also deals with how they were social constructions in terms of the diagnoses, public and medical perceptions, and treatments. On a revisionist note, she argues that Victorians were not sexually repressed individuals. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras, psychiatrists (or alienists) continually sought to justify and define their own existence. Oppenheim explores the social construction of nervous disorders, including depression and mental illness, with specific regard to women, men, and children and in general with regard to the Victorian and Edwardian societies. Oppenheim says, "They never acknowledged, and probably never realized, what seems so obvious today: that layers of cultural presupposition enveloped every case of mental and nervous illness and interfered with the real comprehension of patients' needs." Disorders of this kind were often only vaguely defined, yet they required individualized and specialized attention, care, and knowledge by doctors. Individuals belonging to a higher social class were less likely than working class people to receive a diagnosis of insanity because of the social ramifications that would follow in an already highly stratified society like Britain's. Most of a man's illnesses were honorable but a woman's were not. Oppenheim discusses some of the differences between mental causes and somatic causes and the differences between insanity and depression, which differed according to the ever-changing society and culture. Victorian scientists explained these illnesses in terms of energy.

Russett also provides an introduction to humans and their supposedly limited energy supplies, which grew out of the law of conservation of energy and the first law of thermodynamics. "Men thought more because they ate more." These theories proposed that the human body functioned parallel to machines and the universe. Humans received energy by eating. Men used energy to think and work. Women, in turn, were to reserve all of their energy for their highly taxing reproductive duties. These scientists, including Spencer, thought that the "development and maintenance of a highly complex reproductive system" used all of a woman's possible energy, especially during puberty. Women had such little energy left after this biological function that they were always living "at the nervous edge." Women who sought to learn and who actually sought intellectual pursuits were risking "the extinction of human race" with their "reproductive negligence." Thus, science confirmed why Shakespeare's sisters should not be granted admission into the realms of academia.

According to Oppenheim, "The fact that shattered frames were just as likely to belong to men as to women caused Victorian psychiatrists no little difficulty in an era when the differences between the sexes were being relentlessly emphasized." Contrary to stereotypes and Russett's presentation of men, men were not solely strong individuals who condemned women. Oppenheim points out, for example, that Darwin, Spencer, and even Mill were sickly individuals who faced depression and problems of not having enough energy. In fact, that is almost all Oppenheim says about them. Whereas women had hysteria, most men had hypochondriasis, "a genuine somatic disorder." This was a respectable disorder for men who had been working too hard for their family's livelihood. Russett shows that nineteenth-century men had not always been expected to display "nerves of [the] steely variety." Earlier in the century before the emphasis on education, militarism, and sports increased, society allowed and even expected men to show sympathy, weakness, or nervousness, something like their silenced sisters. A man's public success became an indicator of his private worth as the century progressed. Oppenheim never completely explains how and why these mores made such dramatic shifts. Nonetheless, men broke down from using up their energy because they were doing their society-defined duty to work and protect their family. Society, Oppenheim argues, assigned no blame for mental or somatic illness of this cause. That men were not punished for illness--and women were--points to one more double standard in sexual differences and that science was in many ways a social construction.

Men also suffered depression from sexual excess or shortage. Unlike overwork, this was not an admirable reason for a male to suffer nervous collapse. According to Oppenheim, masturbation was attacked by society more than anything else was. Victorians said, it made individuals antisocial and taxed their energy. Even marital intercourse could be dangerous because it resulted in a loss of sperm and power; therefore; it caused men to lose energy, too. But, too little experience in sexual explorations could also cause nervous disorders.

Victorians "contended that the very nature of female physiology, dominated as it was by reproductive organs, made the exhaustion of nerve force a constant likelihood in women, who could exercise little control over the disaster." Oppenheim, further, explains that unlike a man's depression, a woman's depression and lack of energy from all of her reproductive efforts was likely to be chronic. Moreover, women were weak and lacked self-control. All women were dangerous, according to these doctrines. Single women or educated women were especially dangerous with their unusually out-of-balance energy and nerves. When these scientists deemed education dangerous for a woman and as having negative repercussions for her children and society, they were not only silencing Shakespeare's sisters with fear, but these scientists also made them more nervous. Rather than receiving a specific treatment and diagnosis, a woman's problems were often simply classified as a female disorder. (Unfortunately, recent studies reveal this is the case in 2009, too.) This depression made women's lives such that they could just manage their womanly duties as wives and mothers. Science and medicine neglected to help women and thereby continued their silence. "Whichever way they turned, they heard that femininity was a deeply flawed condition."

Both scholars share a few of the same overarching features. Neither of their books has a bibliography, images, or is based on archival research. Neither book looks to the Victorian discussions that debated whether or not women were even human. Neither book, beyond a few sentences, looks to the ancient and philosophical roots of these ideas in the so-called Western tradition. Both of their monographs remain something of "great men" and intellectual histories because they never explore how these ideas affected everyday life for most women, men, and children. How widespread were these ideas? As bottom-up social history has continually demonstrated, the actual way in which most people (those in the lower class at this time) live and think is often very different. Russett never moves beyond discussing the theories and consequences that in name limited and kept women as the weaker sex. Unfortunately, women in Sexual Science remain absent and abstract, with the important exception of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a feminist writer and author of Herland (1915). Oppenheim does, however, explain how these ideas affected those who belonged to middle and upper social classes, and she does include a few individual women. Overall, she has a more diverse cast of historical actors throughout the book.

Sexual Sciences is limited by its complete lack of definitions, especially as this is such a specialized field. Readers unfamiliar with nineteenth-century science will find it necessary to seek a dictionary every few pages. Dictionary definitions, however, are limited in their ability to help readers because they do not reveal the Victorian definitions, they do not necessarily reflect the actual usage of the terms (i.e., connotation versus denotation), and they do not reveal exactly what Russett means.

Ultimately, Russett's own statements, or lack thereof, undermine Sexual Science's force. She does not contextualize her topic. For example, political, economic, and social situations of the Victorian era do not have any place in this book. After detailing throughout her monograph, for example how men categorized women as being both "children" and "savages," she concludes in her last paragraph that men were literally no more than products of society, thus denying them any and all agency. These men she denies freewill were educated individuals who had knowledge that women's roles could be different and that some, such as Mill, wanted women's roles to be different and equal to men's. Women, too, had long been fighting for their own increased autonomy. Furthermore, science was a social construction because these men used new resources to "confirm" women's subordinate status and their prior prejudices. The Victorian and Edwardian scientific ideas furthered and created opposition to female's equality. It is only fair and accurate to recognize men's agency. This elitist male science helped these ideas, through numerous publications and lectures, achieve a new legitimacy. Agency is also missing when it comes to women in Sexual Science. Society, as a social organism, is the only thing that receives true agency in this monograph.

Furthermore, throughout the text, Russett avoids analyzing the ideas presented, and she avoids taking a firm, polemical stand. In places where she does come out and take a stand, she frequently seems to retract to the opposite position a few sentences later. For example, she starts a paragraph: "Charles Darwin will never be elevated to a niche in the pantheon of feminism." She concludes: "The Decent of Man did not validate the oppression of women." Unfortunately, Russett did not use an excellent chance to deconstruct these theories. But, perhaps that opportunity awaits a future scholar now that these theories are in one source--Sexual Science.

"Shattered Nerves" is more balanced than Sexual Science, it is aware of its limits, and it remains more directly relevant in the twenty-first century. Most importantly, Oppenheim reminds readers that today's medical practices and science, especially psychiatry, will likely be critiqued as a social construction by another generation of scholars. By focusing on one specific strand of science (depression and mental illness caused by a depletion of energy), Oppenheim goes into more depth than Russett and shows change over time. For example, the professionalization and institutionalization of the social and natural sciences form a backdrop in Oppenheim's account. She shows how these fields did make some legitimate improvements. But also, as she makes clear through her very descriptive account, throughout these changes Victorian doctors and scientists "were consistent in distinguishing the nervous collapse that befell men from the same disorder in women." Oppenheim also shows how men too were victims of science. Overall, although not a praise or critique, Oppenheim studies areas that have increased grounding in reality, as these people were actually ill. Her "Shattered Nerves" remains more directly relevant than Sexual Science because society still discusses mental illness, depression, nerves, and psychiatry. While the ideas in Sexual Science are important, among mainstream society they have been mostly discredited, with some notable exceptions. The presence of Oppenheim's clear and strong voice throughout "Shattered Nerves" only adds to its power.

Nevertheless, both Oppenheim and Russett clearly demonstrate their long-lasting agency and knowledge by having written these books that clearly required many years of background preparation. Both of these authors demand a lot from their readers, with their important, complex prose and thoughts. As a perfect combination, Sexual Science and "Shattered Nerves" understand and deal with complex ideas and thoughts, as discussed in this essay. These theories seem beyond reach at times in the twenty-first century, ideas which were powerful and transforming. Both books speak to several different strands of academic and cultural discourses. Either book would be appropriate for studying nineteenth century history, intellectual history, cultural history, medical history, the history of science, or of course, women's history. Having individuals who understand these ideas is important, for these ideas in many ways have shaped the modern world in which we live.

Although the lives and careers of many of Shakespeare's sisters may never be excavated and they were never given opportunities that would necessitate their being rediscovered, he has many more sisters today who, with full justification, demand recognition as exactly equal humans:

"Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroad still lives. She lives in you and in me....for great poets do not die....For my belief is that if we live another century or so...then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born....I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while."

The long-debated arguments about women and science, however, remain in twenty-first-century society. President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, Lawrence H. Summers (1954- ) provoked angry responses in 2005 when he proposed that innate differences between men and women might account for there being less successful women in math and science fields. In 2004, Harvard only offered four out of thirty-two tenured positions to women. Whatever one makes of these events, it is indicative that society-driven inequalities still exist between the male and female sex. In 2008, on the other hand, Hillary Rodham Clinton (1947- ) became the first woman who almost received the presidential nomination from a major political party.

Shakespeare's exactly equal sisters--including Russett, Oppenheim, Clinton, and countless others--can no longer be silenced by science and society because they have recognized and celebrated achievements in society and in the University.