Challenging medical misogyny in British suffrage newspapers (1907-1914)

Victorian and Edwardian ideologies of womanhood saw it as coincident with sickness, weakness, and madness, and women’s (supposed) physical frailty was associated with a series of “feminine” attributes like nurturance, emotionality, and sensitivity that became pathological signs of invalidism. Though this was due to highly prescriptive ideas of femininity and to rigid social views on gender roles, these ideologies were reflected, validated, and constructed by medicine as well, so much so that a true epidemic of nervous disorders in women was diagnosed at the turn of the century. More precisely, the quintessentially female malady called hysteria became synonymous with deranged feminine behaviours and emotions: women were seen as erratic, deviant, deceptive, and devious, and the defiance of their nature could only lead to mental breakdown. To demonstrate how women responded to this medical misogyny, this contribution considers a corpus of 715 articles taken from three main suffrage periodicals of the early 1900s (Votes for Women, The Vote, and Common Cause): the analysis of the discourses built around the word hysteria in each context will show how this theme was represented in feminist newspapers and how suffrage campaigners replied to those physicians who labelled them as “shrieking women” and “silly viragos” by constructing counter-discourses that were aimed at debunking gendered ideas about health. The “words as deeds” approach of this study will also relate to the broader role of language in dismantling popular beliefs promoted by those with power and authority against the “weaker” groups of society.