There is something dizzying about realizing that entire generations of women have been locked away, deprived of their rights, or silenced by a single word. A word derived from the Greek *hystera*, meaning uterus. A word that, for centuries, was enough to invalidate a woman, to dismiss her voice, to justify the cruelest treatment. That word is “hysteria.”
Even today, it circulates as an insult. Labeled hysterical, an angry woman ceases to be heard. Her emotion becomes proof of her instability. Her resistance, a symptom of her illness. This shift, from medicine to everyday slur, is no accident. It is the legacy of a very long history of control.
Plato, Hippocrates, and the wandering womb: the origins of the diagnosis
It all began long before modern medicine. Egyptian papyri already mention disorders caused by a “wandering” uterus, along with recommendations for how to deal with them. Women’s bodies were then viewed as an unstable territory, governed by a capricious and dangerous organ.
It was Plato, in the 4th century BCE, who laid the philosophical foundations for this view in the Timaeus. There, he introduced a hierarchy within the human body: the head for the rational soul, the chest for the irascible soul, the belly for the soul of desire. Then he took it a step further by establishing a hierarchy of the sexes. In this view, women become males punished for their cowardice in a previous life. The uterus is thus placed far removed from noble thoughts, on the side of uncontrolled desire, far from reason.
Plato’s description of the womb is striking. It reveals a mindset that prefers to fantasize about the female body rather than understand it. He describes the womb as a living animal inside the body. A being that roams the organs, obstructs breathing, and causes all sorts of ailments whenever it is not occupied by a pregnancy. The uterus as an inner wild beast. Uncontrollable and hungry for motherhood.
The wandering uterus according to Aretaeus of Cappadocia and Hippocrates
The physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia takes up this theory and describes the uterus as “an animal within the animal” that moves about the body as it pleases. When the uterus approaches the liver, the woman becomes melancholic. When it rises, she feels fatigue and dizziness. When it descends, she suffocates and loses her speech. The proposed remedy is telling: to become pregnant as often as possible, to keep the organ occupied. Motherhood as mandatory therapy.
It was then Hippocrates who formalized the diagnosis and gave it its name, derived from the Greek hystera, meaning the womb. The idea that a “disease of the uterus” explained women’s ailments persisted through the centuries without being questioned. In the Middle Ages, hysteria was perceived as having a diabolical origin. Exorcism was recommended. In the 19th century, it evolved into “nervous neurosis.” The slightest behavior deemed deviant became a diagnostic sign.
As sociologist Jeanne de Barthès documents in her masterclass for Feminists in the City on the history of the female orgasm, the list of symptoms cited is impressive: sexual desire, stress, lack of sleep, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite. Simply existing fully as a woman could be enough to get you committed.
Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot took charge of a department at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital starting in 1870. He meticulously studied the manifestations of hysteria, paralysis, gait disturbances, pseudo-epileptic seizures, and introduced hypnosis as a therapeutic tool. His work inspired Freud, who developed his own theory. According to him, women who did not achieve vaginal orgasm were at risk of becoming hysterical. Reading these theories accumulated over millennia, one realizes to what extent medicine has long served to regulate women’s bodies rather than to heal them.
Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest cure: treatment or punishment?
Among the treatments for female hysteria in the 19th century, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure” deserves special attention. This American neurologist first developed his protocols in military hospitals during the Civil War. He then adapted them for his civilian practice. He codified a protocol combining isolation, strict bed rest, overfeeding, massages, and electrotherapy. On paper, it was a program for physical recovery. In reality, for the women who underwent it, it was something entirely different.
S. W. Mitchell targeted almost exclusively intellectual and active women from the upper classes. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams were among those who underwent his treatment. The duration ranged from a few weeks to several months. The prohibition on reading, writing, and thinking constituted a form of targeted violence against these women. What was being attacked was precisely what defined their very existence.
It was the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman who would put into words what S. W. Mitchell inflicted. Subjected to his treatment after a bout of depression, she found herself, in her own words, on the brink of madness. She then decided to write *The Yellow Wallpaper* (1892), published in French under the title *La Séquestrée*. The story is told in the first person by a woman diagnosed as hysterical. Confined to a room, she watches the yellow wallpaper gradually become a mirror of her mental decay. Precisely because she has been deprived of all intellectual activity.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman sent the text directly to S. W. Mitchell. An act of provocation as much as of “propaganda,” in her own words. S. W. Mitchell never replied to her personally. He reportedly confided to a friend, however, that he had changed his treatment of hysterical patients after reading the story. An admission that says it all: the cure did not heal.
A Political Diagnosis: Hysteria to Silence Disruptive Women
What makes hysteria particularly formidable as a tool of domination is that it does not target sick women. It targets disruptive women. As American feminist critic Elaine Showalter documents in her essay *Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender*, the diagnosis applies to women whose behaviors do not conform to patriarchal expectations. In her words: “At a time when patriarchal culture felt under attack by these rebellious girls, the defense was, of course, to label women campaigning for access to universities, the professional sphere, and the vote as mentally ill.”
The treatments themselves speak volumes. Isaac Baker Brown, president of the British Medical Society, recommended clitoridectomy as a cure for hysteria, epilepsy, and homosexuality. He grouped these “disorders” under the label of “forms of female madness.” The procedure was performed with the consent of the father or husband. It remained in use until the 1960s.
Virginia Woolf and the British suffragettes in the face of the diagnosis
Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known examples of what this diagnosis meant in practical terms for a person’s life. Mitchell’s rest cure was introduced to Britain in 1881. It would be used to treat Woolf. During a hospitalization, Dr. Savage prescribed the protocol in its strictest form: she was forbidden to get out of bed, read, write, or engage in any activity whatsoever for several weeks. For a woman whose entire existence revolved around thought and writing, this prescription felt less like treatment and more like a silencing.
British suffragists faced the same tactic. Fighting for political rights, demonstrating, going on hunger strikes, rejecting the established order: all of this was dismissed by the authorities as mere hysteria. As reported in the press archives of the time, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters were portrayed as “mad hooligans.” Their activists were labeled “shrieking hysterics.” Historian Rebecca West protests these portrayals. She asserts that the movement “was neither mad, nor hysterical, nor delusional. It was cold as stone in its realism.”
When imprisoned suffragists began hunger strikes, prison authorities downplayed their experience of force-feeding. Force-feeding was officially dismissed as an exaggeration by hysterical women whose suffering was supposedly self-inflicted. In August 1912, when it was reported to the House of Commons that a woman had been released after becoming hysterical during force-feeding, general laughter erupted in the chamber. The women’s suffering was not only denied; it was mocked.
Hysteria: the word has disappeared from textbooks, but not from men’s mouths
The term “hysteria” was officially removed from the DSM-III in 1980, then from the International Classification of Diseases in 1992. Yet, as several feminist researchers have documented, it continues to permeate medical, judicial, and political practices. It is still used to discredit women in police stations, courts, or the media. In 2020, the newspaper Valeurs Actuelles called elected official Alice Coffin “hysterical” as she denounced sexist violence. Nothing new under the sun.
Simone de Beauvoir already pointed this out in the 1970s: when a woman is called a “hysterical woman, like all women,” there is no recourse. Feminist Elizabeth Grosz articulates the issue precisely. According to her, feminism and hysteria share the same fundamental logic: a rebellion against the demands imposed on women.
Perhaps that is why the word “hysterical” is still so frightening. Not because it describes an illness. But because it has always, unwittingly, referred to something more difficult to suppress: women who refuse to be silenced.
The art installation Hystérie Collective tells no other story than what this article attempts to document: that what was pathologized was resistance. And that resistance, today, continues.