Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Instructions for a case study
Although the major characteristics of the history of “madness” and the nineteenthcentury
history of asylums and institutions is well documented, there has been
little research on women who were labelled as “mad” and their experiences in the
asylums.
1. Do your own research in a local context, documenting the local
social histories of public care institutions and asylums, through
which you may trace the gendered dimensions of mental health
treatments.
2. Collect women’s stories and case studies of women regarded as
“mad” who survived or died in institutions in your local context,
with a view to enhancing comparative knowledge on the social
history of hysteria and other mental illnesses that have traditionally
been labelled as “female”.
3. Discuss which women’s experiences have not been made known
to or taken into consideration by social workers and other
professionals. Why have they failed to internalise a gender
perspective as they work with women with mental health
problems and long-term experiences of psychiatric institutions.
Hysteria in the European Periphery
The medical discourse on hysteria began in Slovenia in 1877. 12 In that year an
article entitled “On Nervousness”, written by the physician Edvard Savnik, was
published in Slovene Nation, an important national journal. The author ascertained
that “nervousness” had become much more frequent due to immorality,
simple-mindedness and the superficiality of “today’s world”. Furthermore, he
believed that from the medical perspective, the number of “sensory points” in
the body was of crucial importance in the development of nervous diseases.
The different number of sensory points in women and men’s bodies was the
crucial reason for the female predisposition to nervousness. Since the female
body had less weight and volume than a male body, and a larger number of
12
Edvard Savnik, “On Nervousness,” Slovene Nation 1, no. 196, 197, 198, 199, 201 (1877).
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