Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
The 26 women who tell their stories here were incarcerated against their will, often by male family members, for holding views or behaving in ways that deviated from the norms of their day. The authors' accompanying history of both societal and psychiatric standards for women reveals the degree to which the prevailing societal conventions could reinforce the perception that these women were "mad".
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Great work, wish there was more.
Customer Rating:
I bought this book but haven't finished reading it completely yet. I find the material very interesting and I love that the book also includes the historical background and framework of the excerpts inside. The entries for each woman are rather short, though. I was hoping for longer pieces by the women who were imprisoned. Though I feel that the work is overedited, I have still been enjoying the reading.
A light on the darkness
Customer Rating:
In collecting and commenting upon the first-hand accounts of women held in U.S. asylums from 1840 - 1945, Geller and Harris shed light on the changing treatment of women by the medical profession and by society at large. Who decides who is mad? What constitutes madness? This book offers haunting accounts from the inmates and provocative commentary from the editors. I read it for research, and it helped inspire a play and a novel. For anyone interested in issues of mental health and misogyny.
Great Book! Great Shape!
Customer Rating:
Book came to me in a timely fashion and was in great shape. Much Thanks!
Chilling Anthology of Voices
Customer Rating:
The accounts treated in this study of interned women are a chilling assortment of shattered lives. Always in the periphery of each story is the question of how mental illness is defined and used by society as an instrument of exclusion or social conditioning. This historical and anecdotal aspect of this book is nonetheless relevant as the horrors and indignities (degradation and abuse, rape, etc.) have continued on into our times, though with albeit increased scrutiny. The 'use' of psychiatry for nontherapeutic ends is as horrifying as it commonplace; a variety of hair-raising studies (such as Dangerous Minds by Robin Munro) have examined its political use. I prefer individual narratives to surveys of cases--autobiographies or diaries-- in the unusual situation in which the interned woman was sufficiently lucid to be able to recount her experience. There is admittedly almost always an element of sexual oppression and domination to these stories, as the Institution or its principals proceed to impose their agenda or themselves on the helpless victims. Narratives such as Running with the Devil by Margot Zimmermann or Writing on the Wall by Mary Elene Wood, like Geller's Women of the Asylum, are rife with material for a prurient film.
Needs more follow up
Customer Rating:
This book was only fair. The intros were boring. It would have been more interesting without the editing and also would have been good to have any information on what finally happened to the women. Some of them may have truly been insane.
Select button not working? 
