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Institutionalizing Gender
Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France
Jessie Hewitt (Author)
9781501753312
Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2020
252 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.454 kg
Institutionalizing Gender invites the reader to rethink ideas about gender within the asylum setting, while revealing as much about the nature of the family in France during this period as it does about French psychiatry. Institutionalizing Gender is highly readable. Hewitt's remarkable new book traces how French asylum doctors deployed changing concepts of gender, family, and class to diagnose and treat mental illness and shore up their own professional authority. Meticulously researched, Institutionalizing Gender is sure to become required reading for historians of France, gender, and psychiatry. This interdisciplinarity emerges as one of the primary strengths of Hewitt's work, bringing fresh eyes to stories told and retold in the field. Hewitt is to be commended for producing an eloquent work that also opens new avenues for further study—by historians of France and gender, as well as those of psychiatry.
Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values. Asylum doctors in nineteenth-century France promoted the notion that manliness was synonymous with rationality, using this "fact" to pathologize non-normative behaviors and confine people who did not embody mainstream gender expectations to asylums. And yet, this gendering of rationality also had the power to upset prevailing dynamics between men and women. Jessie Hewitt argues that the ways that doctors used dominant gender values to find "cures" for madness inadvertently undermined both medical and masculine power—in large part because the performance of gender, as a pathway to health, had to be taught; it was not inherent. Institutionalizing Gender examines a series of controversies and clinical contexts where doctors' ideas about gender and class simultaneously legitimated authority and revealed unexpected opportunities for resistance. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Introduction
1. Gender and the Founding "Fathers" of French Psychiatry
2. Medical Controversy and Honor among (Mad)Men
3. Domesticating Madness in the Family Asylum
4. Scandalous Asylum Commitments and Patriarchal Power
5. Rehabilitating a Profession under Siege
6. Reforming the Asylum and Reimagining the Family
Conclusion: The "Mad" Woman in a Man's World