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  • Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies
  • Mary Briody Mahowald (bio)
Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies. By Rebecca Kukla . Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Mass Hysteria is a wonderful example of a feminist philosopher's ability to combine her philosophical expertise with empirical information and illustrations relevant to her own and other women's lives. Pregnancy and nursing are the experiences on which Rebecca Kukla focuses, and Rousseau is the philosopher on whom she mainly draws in her account and critique of policies and practices regarding these experiences.

Although the term hysteria (from the Greek for uterus or womb) originally referred to illnesses associated with pregnancy, Hippocrates imputed such central importance to gestation that he used the term for any illness in a woman. Then as now, emotionally triggered behaviors in women were construed as hysterical regardless of whether the women were ill. Kukla uses the term hysteria for supposedly disordered behaviors predicated of pregnant women and new mothers, and mass hysteria for the contagious transmission of these behaviors to the public at large. "Hysterical women's bodies," she claims, tend to produce "hysterical body politics" (67).

The thesis that Kukla elaborates and defends is one of consistency between late eighteenth-century Enlightenment accounts of maternal bodies and current cultural and medical views and practices involving pregnant women and mothers of infants. While acknowledging the validity of postmodern critiques of essentialism, Kukla insists on the necessity of attention to differences between male and female bodies, as illustrated through the transforming impact of gestation and lactation on women's sense of themselves. The mass hysteria associated with these experiences threatens the autonomy and bodily integrity of pregnant and nursing women.

In part 1, Kukla sets the stage for her examination of late eighteenth-century attitudes and practices concerning pregnant women and new mothers by describing the relative ignorance of the basic biology of reproduction that existed prior to that time. Childbirth was routinely facilitated through midwifery, an exclusively female profession, and wet nursing was a common practice. Because the female body was a "privatized" domain, it was considered indecent for male physicians to conduct direct physical examination of women, whether pregnant or not. Physicians thus based their medical diagnoses and treatment decisions solely on externally observable signs and women's accounts of their condition. The "maternal body" was particularly mysterious. (Kukla refers to both pregnant and lactating women as "maternal.") Anxieties about paternity and about the impact of the gestating woman's behavior on the fetus [End Page 216] were pervasive. A prevailing theory was that of the "maternal imagination," through which the pregnant woman's experiences, especially those that aroused strong passions such as lust and fear, "were capable of directly inscribing themselves upon the body of the fetus, producing deformities and monstrosities" (13). Birth outcomes were thus construed as indicators of a new mother's good or bad behavior during gestation.

According to Kukla, Rousseau played a pivotal role in changing social images and expectations regarding women's bodies, especially those of lactating women. Enlightenment culture had brought with it a tension between human freedom and the claims of nature. Rousseau's theory of the general will offered a means of ameliorating between the two, but his theory could only be implemented through good citizens. The indispensable route to acquiring good citizens was nursing mothers who, through their milk, would inculcate in their infants the virtues of citizenship that the Republic demanded. Because these virtues could only be imparted to infants through the women who gave birth to them, Rousseau railed against wet nursing as an unnatural depravity that led to degeneration of the entire moral order. Correcting "this simple abuse," he thought, was crucial to social reform (30).

As Rousseau's notion of maternal responsibility for the public realm took hold, civil authorities and medical professionals took measures to insure that women fulfilled this responsibility. Women were increasingly expected to place themselves under the care of male physicians and to follow their instructions faithfully with regard to pregnancy and mothering. If they did not do so, they were bad mothers, or as Kukla puts it, "unruly mothers." In contrast, "the fetish mother" is one...

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