Curing Women’s Souls
– On Class, Healthy Work and the Cult of Invalidism
In the article we scrutinize ‘the cult of invalidism’ (Dijkstra 1986) and the ideal of ‘true womanhood’ by analyzing a range of historical materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries dealing with women’s mental health. Drawing upon medical and lay texts, as well as women’s autobiographies, the article problematizes the universalistic assumption of passive, non-working, fragile femininity as being normative. In so doing, we demonstrate how social class and work ideal shaped notions of femininity and health in the Lutheran Norden of that time. By examining documents pertaining to confined female mental patients in Finland and selfbiographies written by the Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, we wish to broaden previous notions of ‘female madness’ that often have relied exclusively on medical representations. We argue that Nordic research on work, gender and citizenship offer more multifaceted ways of approaching both ‘written’ and ‘experienced’ mental illness. The article illustrates how women’s capacity to work created differences in psychiatric pathologies and diagnoses, in addition to work being crucial in women’s own experiences of illness, as they regarded work as fundamental to their psychological well-being. We discuss work in terms of necessity; health ideal; civil/citizenship ideal of the bourgeoisie; and lived experience. We demonstrate how social class, bodies and sexualities established differences between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ femininities. In societal, medical and cultural representations, working-class women were positioned as ‘bodily’, sexual and ‘out-acting’, while medical experts focused on middle-class women’s ‘inner’, ‘sophisticated’, melancholic moods, thus less threatening, and consequently, more legitimate forms of mental illness. The article concludes that the work ideal was more influential than the fragility/invalidism discourse, also for middle-class women themselves – in the construction of normative and normal femininity in fin-de-siècle.
