Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France

[From the introduction:] This study... examines the workings of the asylum and its role in both the elaboration and deterioration of bourgeois gender values during France’s long nineteenth century, a period defined by the contested but steady advance of political liberalism, the social dislocations of industrialization and urbanization, and the seemingly triumphal professionalization of medicine. Each of these long-term processes were inflected by and had consequences for the emergence of new gender ideals promoted and embodied by the French bourgeoisie, as well as new conceptions of madness and rationality. Examining the historical interplay of these developments from the vantage point of the asylum reorients our understanding of the nineteenth century in three key ways. First, it disrupts popular understandings of psychiatric authority during the profession’s so-called golden age, showing how doctors were beholden to powerful gender expectations even as they benefited from them. At the same time, the ways asylum doctors used gender ideals such as masculine self-control and feminine domesticity in the process of patient treatment also indicate that medicine regularly undermined these very norms in spite of itself, especially with respect to the widespread belief in the inherent rationality of men. Finally, and relatedly, considering gender and madness side by side situates the nineteenth century as a transitional moment in the history of the family, in which gendered conceptions of reason supplanted biological sex as the primary justification for masculine authority within the
home and beyond.