Mills’s Reviews > Women's Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? > Status Update

"Women are re-formed, re-invented, in a different guise: our bodies distorted, reshaped in a form pleasing to men; our minds controlled, ordered, altered; any threat or independent thought neutralised. Is it surprising that we are made mad?"

"Women are both powerful through their perceived affinity to nature, their ability to reproduce, and their role as the mother, and powerless through their supposed frailty, their very fecundity, their purported weakness and lability."

"Women are objectified, associated with danger and temptation, with impurity, with an uncontrolled sexuality. They are at the same time to be worshiped and defiled, evoking horror and desire, temptation and repugnance, fear and fascination"

"Labelling us mad silences our voices. We can be ignored. The rantings of a mad woman are irrelevant. Her anger is impotent."

"In the antipsychiatry literature... the sickness was deemed to be within the system, either the family or society, not within the person."

"the stigma of madness...: shame, fear, guilt, perhaps for many people more debilitating than the symptoms called madness."

"the unhappiness had no outlet in this world determined to deny women the right to their tears, to their torment"