A Historical Overview of Women's Hysteria in Slovenia

Abstract

The article is a discursive analysis of medical, ecclesiastic and lay articles on women's hysteria published in Slovenia between 1877 and 1935. The analysis shows which discourses of women's hysteria dominated across Europe at the turn of the century and how they influenced the construction of the image of female biological and mental inferiority. Special attention is paid to the issue of how far the medical discourse on hysteria helped to justify the gendered division between the public and private realm. The article presents the wider framework of the medicalization of women across Europe at that time, and tries to trace the ideas which mostly influenced medical doctors in Slovenia. The medical construction of women's hysteria has to be understood in conjunction with the construction of the social space in which segregation of ‘social deviants’ took place. The spread of hysteria went hand in hand with the psychiatric institutionalization, the pathologization of sexuality and the eugenic movements which appeared in different parts of Europe, to differing degrees, but which all influenced and gendered the everyday life of women and men.