Black Women’s Psychiatric Incarceration at Georgia Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century

During the nineteenth century, thousands of Black women were treated in state mental asylums throughout the US South. However, their unique experiences have been neglected in the history of psychiatry. This article considers the lives of African American women who were sent to the infamous Georgia Lunatic Asylum in the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that post-slavery psychiatric practices worked in tandem with a myriad of postbellum social realities, including cultural constructions of Black femininity, poverty, intimate-partner violence, and racism, to distinguish Black women’s experiences of “insanity” and psychiatric incarceration from those of their white female counterparts and white and Black men. The psychiatric discourses developed to manage nineteenth-century Black women’s minds and bodies set the stage for their experiences of mental disability and treatment for generations to come.