One of the things I liked most about the book was its personal approach, using the perspectives of female "inmates" themselves, and fiction excerpts from a variety of authors, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte, Doris Lessing, and others to highlight women's mental health issues and experiences with doctors and provide an insight into the culture and period. I read this book from cover to cover and would have been very happy if it were a school text. It examines cultural expectations about how women should behave and how these male perceptions affected the diagnosis and treatment of women’s mental health problems. Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 is a very informative, very accessible, and very disturbing look at how “insanity” was treated from 1830 to 1980.
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