Free Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein, Susan Kim

matter with them; and if they do not die, the evil will cling to them and make them miserable through all their lives.” He also darkly insinuated that masturbators would swiftly become either insane or mentally retarded, and would very likely commit suicide.

    This may all seem like a hopeless contradiction, and yet it makes a certain perverse sense. Western society has always assumed that women experience pleasure exclusively via the vagina, i.e., from intercourse with a man. Only vaginal penetration was considered stimulating to women, which is why the speculum and tampon were so controversial when they were introduced and the vibrator basically given a free pass. As a result, masturbation was viewed as something unwholesome and unnatural, while therapeutic stimulation was simply a means to an end, namely to relieve hysteria.
    Even though hysteria was finally disavowed by the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1950s, the notion lingered on—now thought to be a result of a woman’s frigidity. Subtly, the prevailing attitude had shifted: the woman was no longer the passive victim of hysteria due to her uterus, but was instead somehow at fault due to her innate coldness and lack of interest in sex. From the 1954 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex: “There are women who have‘grown cold’, women who, as a result of the deadly monotony of their marriage, have gradually lost their former undoubted potency and sometimes even their sexual desire. In such cases the medical man can do nothing. These emotionally dead people should be left to their dead, and our efforts should be devoted to the countless other unfortunate people whom it is still possible to help.”
    Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

    There are dozens of conflicting explanations and theories explaining what hysteria was, what caused it and cured it, and even reasons for its great epidemic in the late nineteenth century. While many blamed frigidity, others blamed the physical constraints of fashion, the effects of diet, the need for children. Wherever the truth actually lies, we do feel that lying beneath the bogus, catchall unspecificity of the diagnosis, something was actually going on … something that brought genuine suffering to untold numbers of women. The question is, what was it exactly? And perhaps just as significantly, what brought it on?
    We’re pretty sure that regular lack of sexual fulfillment may well have contributed to the unhappiness many women clearly felt for so many thousands of years. Yet can we get both political and conspiracy theorish for a moment?
    Could what was historically called hysteria—widespread instances of clinical depression, unhappiness, anxiety, anger—have been a simple product not so much of sexual or maternal frustration, but of actual systematized oppression? After all, throughout history, women had no rights or autonomy, and were routinely barred from higher education, property ownership, the right to vote, careers. Could it be that when anyone is faced with such fundamental obstacles to happiness and self-actualization, even a whiz-bang orgasm isn’t enough to make things all better again?
    By the mid-nineteenth century, change was in the air. The suffrage movement was on the rise, and women were fighting for higher education, as well. The possibilities were tantalizing, and yet the pressures brought by such change were enormous, taking their toll on women both mentally and emotionally. Margaret Sanger, the great birth control crusader, spent time incapacitated by deep depression. Jane Addams, social activist and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was also debilitated by depression for seven years. And Alice James, brilliant sister of novelist Henry and philosopher William, was chronically beset by nervous breakdowns that ruined her life.
    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an early feminist writer, was diagnosed with hysteria in the late 1800s and was sent to Dr. Silas Weir