This article investigates the consequences of unlocking psychiatric wards and allowing male and female patients and staff to mix freely in the post-war period. I argue that the sexes were allowed to socialise with each other primarily for the benefit of male patients, and that some superintendents were ‘blind’ to the dangers of sexual abuse to which female patients were exposed, especially given the growing number of male ‘sexual psychopaths’ who were being admitted to open wards. While male nurses did complain about mixed wards in the mid 1960s, it was not until the rise of feminism and patient activism that the extent of sexual abuse and violence in hospitals began to be revealed a decade later. By the 1980s, despite calls to return to segregated living, psychiatric hospitals were no longer able to fund single-sex wards, exposing many women to sexual danger and deterring them from seeking help as in-patients.
...MoreArticle Louise Hide; Joanna Bourke (2018) Cultures of Harm in Institutions of Care: Introduction. Social History of Medicine (pp. 679-687).
Book
Everett Yuehong Zhang;
(2015)
The Impotence Epidemic: Men's Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China
(/isis/citation/CBB173218152/)
Article
Kelly, Brendan D.;
(2008)
Poverty, Crime and Mental Illness: Female Forensic Psychiatric Committal in Ireland, 1910--1948
(/isis/citation/CBB000930668/)
Book
Barbara Taylor;
(2015)
The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times
(/isis/citation/CBB936823533/)
Book
Claire Hilton;
(2017)
Improving Psychiatric Care for Older People: Barbara Robb’s Campaign 1965-1975
(/isis/citation/CBB657852750/)
Article
Jennifer Wallis;
(2018)
A Home or a Gaol? Scandal, Secrecy, and the St James’s Inebriate Home for Women
(/isis/citation/CBB355616622/)
Chapter
Suzuki, Akihito;
(2007)
Lunacy and Labouring Men: Narratives of Male Vulnerability in Mid-Victorian London
(/isis/citation/CBB000773391/)
Thesis
Alex Crawley;
(2018)
Method in His Madness Enacting Male Normativity in Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane, 1880-1910
(/isis/citation/CBB459377349/)
Article
Louise Hide;
Joanna Bourke;
(2018)
Cultures of Harm in Institutions of Care: Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB608760318/)
Chapter
Katarina Kärnebro;
(2013)
The Emergence of Men’s Studies in Educational Research: Experiences From the Swedish Case
(/isis/citation/CBB518609637/)
Article
Catherine Cox;
Hilary Marland;
(2018)
Broken Minds and Beaten Bodies: Cultures of Harm and the Management of Mental Illness in Mid- to Late Nineteenth-century English and Irish Prisons
(/isis/citation/CBB458369956/)
Article
Hewitt, Jessie;
(2015)
Women Working “Amidst the Mad”: Domesticity as Psychiatric Treatment in Nineteenth-Century Paris
(/isis/citation/CBB001422233/)
Article
Segrest, Mab;
(2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race
(/isis/citation/CBB001201824/)
Article
Williams, Elizabeth A.;
(2008)
Gags, Funnels and Tubes: Forced Feeding of the Insane and of Suffragettes
(/isis/citation/CBB000932168/)
Article
Conis, Elena;
(2013)
A Mother's Responsibility: Women, Medicine, and the Rise of Contemporary Vaccine Skepticism in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001213524/)
Thesis
Koerber, Amy Lynn;
(2002)
United States Breast-feeding Education and Promotion, 1978--1999: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis
(/isis/citation/CBB001562489/)
Article
Watson, Lindsay R.;
(2013)
Tom Tiddler's Ground: Irregular Medical Practitioners and Male Sexual Problems in New Zealand, 1858--1908
(/isis/citation/CBB001320602/)
Article
Claire Hilton;
(2016)
Psychogeriatrics in England in the 1950s: Greater Knowledge with Little Impact on Provision of Services
(/isis/citation/CBB811981713/)
Article
Tatjana Buklijas;
(2017)
The laboratory and the asylum: Francis Walker Mott and the pathological laboratory at London County Council Lunatic Asylum, Claybury, Essex (1895–1916)
(/isis/citation/CBB181490050/)
Article
Smith, Cathy;
(2012)
“Visitation by God”: Rationalizing Death in the Victorian Asylum
(/isis/citation/CBB001232197/)
Book
Porter, Roy;
(2003)
Women, Madness and Spiritualism
(/isis/citation/CBB000550416/)
Be the first to comment!