It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)

by Karen Tang

This word, hysteria, contains all the judgments and assumptions about female bodies that have existed for thousands of years. It suggests that women’s distressing physical symptoms stem from a combination of anxiety, mental or neurologic weakness, and broken uteri, rather than from not-yet-understood medical conditions.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a nameless protagonist is subjected to the rest cure by her physician husband; she’s kept in an infantilized state in a New England nursery and forbidden to work or write. She is driven to madness and imagines that a woman is trapped within the wallpaper. By the end of the story, she has become the woman in the wallpaper and frees herself by ripping the wallpaper off the walls.

Women continue to be treated as if they need to be protected from their own minds when it comes to reproductive decisions such as birth control, sterilization, and abortion.

Due to these decades of excluding women from research trials, data about everything from heart disease to medication efficacy do not include information about the effects on women or potential gender differences in results.

Gynecologic procedures are reimbursed at significantly lower rates than procedures in any other surgical field, including urology, which treats the male reproductive organs.