SOURCE: Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “Crazy Ladies?” New Republic 194, no. 17 (28 April 1986): 34-6.

In the following review, Spacks commends Showalter's extensive knowledge and detailed accounts of psychiatric abuses in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, but finds shortcomings in Showalter's myopic thesis and oversimplified interpretations.

Uncovering the sexual politics of British psychiatric history, Elaine Showalter tells an often lurid, sometimes blackly comic, usually surprising story [in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,] that raises disturbing questions. England has a distinctive association with madness. In the early 18th century, Showalter reports, George Cheyne, a medical doctor, lent official sanction to popular belief by writing a book on insanity called The English Malady. Because of their climate (according to many Europeans) or their natural sensitivity (as Cheyne argued) the English were considered especially susceptible to mental disorders. The most vulnerable portion of this vulnerable population allegedly...