Written by Angela Paulson
Illustration by Faith Freshwater
This piece was originally published in ‘Vestige’, Bossy’s 2023 print edition.
I am twelve years old, on the floor, looking at the boy who pushed me over. Seething in anger, I yell at the boy, watching his face morph at my rage. He looks at me and spits the words ‘crazy bitch’, his eyes accusatory and his gaze never leaving my face. I am followed by the teacher’s mutterings asking me to calm down. My throat closes, my hands tremble, and a vicious internal dialogue envelops my brain—and like every woman that has come before me, I watch in fear as the age-old label ‘hysterical’ gets etched into my forehead.
Hysteria, etymologically linked to hystericus (‘of the womb’), conveys the idea of the ‘wandering’ uterus—a ‘living creature’ that moves around the body, causing women to act psychologically insane and neurotically irrational. To cure this certain disease, the uterus needed to be either pushed back or, in most cases, removed from the body altogether.
This all-consuming idea of female hysteria has been passed down from mothers to daughters to ensure that they are polite, submissive-outspoken, but only within the limits of male comfortability. The lives and choices of women are dictated by this fear of being pinned as hysteric. Thus, young women hesitate to be more outspoken in class; they’d rather follow the lead of their male counterparts rather than pave the way themselves. They adopt a docile persona of mildness and passivity to ensure that they blend into beige-toned walls rather than exist as people themselves. The range of acceptable emotions for a woman have been created by a man, in order to sculpt the ideal female image in his mind. A spectrum that ensures that the perfect woman has a mild temperament—she’s cool, chill, low maintenance. She doesn’t care about anything. She’s so easy to get along with.
The fear of being labelled as crazy or insane has chained femininity to only exist to appease the man. Any time a woman’s voice rises against the man—whether it is within government chambers or courtrooms, dinner parties or classrooms—the moment the male ego is threatened, she is again tied up and her mouth taped shut by claims of hysteria and irrationality. If a tear leaves a woman’s eyes, she is too emotional. If she yells, she’s too mad. If she doesn’t smile, she’s a stone-cold bitch.
The hesitancy of men to perceive a woman as a whole person can be viewed in the persistent male criticism of famed poetess Sylvia Plath—whose authoritative work screamed the frustration, ambition and anger seeping out of a compliant young woman. Early critics of her work—always men—deemed her voice ‘shrill, deranged’, her poetry ‘hard to penetrate’ hidden in ‘morbid’ secrecy. Her writing encased how being a person did not exist if you were a woman—you were a shell, an idea, a thought—that Plath breathed rage and frustration into—that male critics found hard to accept.
Anything beyond this narrow margin of what femininity dictates and you’re damned by civil society—burned at the stake, or worse, rendered a lonely spinster cursed with eighteen cats. These inherent requirements of society can be better viewed through the women who have been given the badge of ‘crazy’ and ‘hysterical’. When you shift to modern examples, to the likes of Taylor Swift, who within the lens of ‘proper’ society is nothing but a ‘clingy, crazy ex’ who writes emotional revenge songs screaming about the hundreds of guys she’s dated. She’s only a ‘whore’ who has too many emotions, existing in a dichotomy with the likes of Ed Sheeran, whose rational, heart-tugging songs are about the lost loves he’s experienced and the journey of soulful relationships a person experiences in their life. We can move to Greta Thunberg, who at 16 expressed her distress at the truth that our environment is crumbling, only to be bullied by triggered middle aged men who accused her of being ‘mentally-ill’, unstable, a weirdo, a hysterical teenager, likening her activism to medieval witchcraft. Serena Williams, labelled out of control, unprofessional and scary after breaking her racket and yelling at the umpire—actions which got Andre Agassi the label of being a beloved ‘bad boy’ and a Canon contract, while Williams received $17,000 in fines. The list goes on, from Hillary Clinton’s cackle and shrill voice to Amber Heard’s designation as the ‘crazy, jealous ex’, women’s existence beyond the margins of docile passivity will always threaten male dominance. If she does not fit the perceived notions of what the ‘ideal’ woman is, she is demonised and outcasted, resulting in generations of women straining from self-destruction and self-harm, unable to carve their brilliance onto the world.
Women of colour, in particular, experienced being branded as crazy or hysterical at a heightened state, influenced by intersecting forms of discrimination. The second wave of feminism, lauded for its emphasis on normalising and empowering ‘female rage,’ often marginalized the experiences of women of colour, in particular Black women. The movement towards female liberation became reserved for white middle-class women, whose radical voices were tolerated and built from the silences demanded from black women. Racial stereotypes, such as the ‘angry black women,’ stripped women of their femininity, requiring them to become docile and passive to be welcome into the spaces that white feminists occupied. Too often, for First Nations’ women, it meant being branded as doped up, drunk, and crazy if they dared to speak up in the face of injustice or advocate for their rights and the rights of their communities. These racialized colonial stereotypes continue to permeate our society, forcing generations of women of colour to aspire only to exist within the boundaries of white patriarchal comfortability. Thus, it is critical in understanding that women of colour consistently must face intersectional forms of discrimination in order to move beyond the labels of hysteria.
Although many argue that the term ‘hysteria’ itself has become dated, that we have moved past it, and that modern cultural waves of feminism have obliterated the use of the word in our current ‘woke’ media, I often think about the different instances I dared to raise the tone of my voice and have watched men shake their heads and mutter a phrase that women know all too well: ‘someone’s on their period’. A woman’s rage, sadness, disgust and passion all become reduced to single phrase. Every time I have heard this comment made to me, I’ve laughed politely, afraid of being seen as ‘too much’ and ‘not cool’.
Again, I’m twelve years old. I stand in the corridors of my school—ashamed and abashed. The boy’s branding of what I am has devoured every other aspect of whom I believed myself to be—one moment of resistance dictated that I was thrown back into the history pages, where women who stepped out of the margins were burned and bruised. Her intellect and free will are only symptoms of a more significant disease. A disease that requires the wandering uterus to be ripped out and thrown. Thus, our society has dictated that only those who carve out every inch of their femininity can rise above the labels of irrationality and hysteria. A woman’s emotions continue to be possessed by the man; society’s acceptable standards dictate her nature.
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