Analysis Of The Hysteria Of Women

1089 Words3 Pages

In the book, Between the World and Me (111-152), Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests that Black people have been dehumanized for so long because White people have had power over them since the beginning of slavery. Black people have always been at a disadvantage when it comes to the safety and protection of their bodies and there was never anything they could do to prevent such destruction from happening. Coates writes: “Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional”(114). In this case, the terrorists are White people. White people have taken the Black body and made it into something so frightening to other Americans that, as a result, we now experience …show more content…

This disorder is believed to mess with not only a woman’s hormones, but with her mind as well. Paracelsus theorized that “disorders of the uterus could result in hysterical fits that take away all reason and sensibility”(96). This explains why women lack reason and therefore are inferior to man, as we’ve seen throughout the course. Walter Johnson, in his Morbid Emotions of Women, implies- “Woman’s nature, her supposedly greater role in reproduction, makes her more vulnerable to insanity”(100). Although there’s some speculation on page 98 that hysteria could also be found in men, the idea was rejected and it was concluded that hysteria was of female essence. Any case of hysteria found in a male would be considered a rare exception to the rule. Because this disorder alone disrupts the female body so significantly, nineteenth-century medical scientists saw “the arousal of [sexual] appetite as the greatest danger to a woman’s mental well-being”(104). They feared that the sexual hormones on top of the reproductive hormones would be just too much for women to handle. English gynecologist, Isaac Baker Brown concluded that “the only effective cure [was] the destruction of the nerve through clitoridectomy”(105) Fortunately for women, protests eventually lead the circumcision of females to it’s demise

Open Document