Gender and Insanity as Characteristics of the Insane: A Nineteenth-Century Case

Since the mid-1960s, social control has been a major explanatory model in accounting for the emergence and development of insane asylums. Of specific concern was the introduction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of “moral treatment.” Historians have debated the reasons for its introduction and its value endlessly, and while the debate has added greatly to our understanding of asylum reformers and bureaucracies, it has not contributed equally to our understanding of who the insane were. Recent studies have begun to do this.