The book is eloquently written and accessible to general and scholarly readers. Only feminist psychiatric theory and practice, she concludes, offer hope for change. Showalter presents a moving, troubling history and a strong, surely controversial, argument drawing on literature and art as well as on case histories. The doctors' response was to treat them like women. Men in war, experiencing powerlessness, responded with hysterialike women. She finds one exception, and a fascinating parallel, in the shell-shocked soldiers of World War I. They have this in common: The treatments are devised by men and inflicted, predominantly, on women. Approaches to treatment have ranged from kindly paternalism to repressive discipline to psychosurgery to drugs. Showalter, well known for her feminist studies of literature, here turns her attention to the history of psychiatry.
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