Levoton nainen by Anna Kortelainen

Finished last of my "real books" yesterday, a book my mom gave me as a Christmas present: Levoton nainen by Anna Kortelainen. This book is about the cultural history of hysteria, especially about women's hysteria in the late 19th century. Quite horrendous reading really, the way women were oppressed and mistreated in the name of medical science - basically anything that women did that was out of ordinary (i.e. outside "sit still and keep your mouth shut") like nervousness, mood swings, crying and shouting was diagnosed as hysteria. The symptoms and the diagnosis were in most cases enough to lead the women into institutionalisation, isolation and into horrible and cruel and humiliating treatments. Especially in Paris in late 1800's hysteric women were put on display for large audiences, they were hypnotised and then made to display their symptoms in cruel and unnecessary ways.

Kortelainen uses letters written by Albert Edelfelt (a Finnish artist of that time) to set the background, and she then uses examples of art, literature and other famous figures of the time (like Sarah Bernhard, Ida Aalberg and Edelfelt's wife Ellan) to tell this fascinating story. Kortelainen says that hysteria has never in fact been the illness or the disease it was claimed to be, but a reflection of it's times - in this case the last effort to chain women that were starting to gain independence in Europe. When the creator of the hysteria cult in Europe Jean-Martin Charcot died, the idea quickly died with him and at the same time psychotherapy started to take it's first steps leading into more humane ways of treating mentally ill patients. Not that most of these women were really mentally ill - often they were just frustrated and desperate of their situations are found that this was the only way to get attention. In case of Ellan E. she actually wanted to have a career but the times forced her to marry an unsuitable and unfaithful man, which led into a nervous breakdown.

This book got me thinking again of feminism and place of women in the modern society. I believe I'm quite lucky in that I've never really come across any form sexual discrimination, either in Finland or in England. Still I know it happens, in both countries. The only time I've never come across any sexual discrimination or real chauvinism was at high school, were although most guys only did it because they got some macho points from it and not because they believed in it, there were some people who took it for granted that men were better than women. This kind of attitude has always amazed me - and those events are probably the reason I was quite raging feminist when I was younger - an overreaction to those people that tried to put me down because of my gender.

I would probably still describe myself as a feminist, although my views are quite a bit more relaxed than they used to be. I know the f-word has a bad reputation, and some people take it to mean female superiority, which I don't of course believe in. Still I feel that the word has its place and its use - and I still sometimes feel the holy rage when I read books like this - or come across things like Boys Toys incident that Janka wrote about some time ago (don't get me wrong, the book wasn't really a feministic book as such, it was actually surprisingly gender-neutral considering the topic). Injustice does that to me anyway, but maybe it's just that the gender issue is still a softer spot than I realised.