Women and Psychiatric Modernism

he therapies of Rivers and Yealland represented the two modes of English psychiatric modernism which would affect women both inside and outside the asylum from the 1920s to the 1960s: psychoanalysis, which offered the twentieth century's most influential theory of femininity and female sexuality; and traditional medical psychiatry, which made rapid advances in scientific knowledge and technological skill. In many respects, it seemed as if women had benefitted from the social upheaval of the war. The image of idle middle-class women as the chief clientele for nervous disorders had been substantially modified. In the decade after the war, the incidence of female hysteria dramatically declined. Many believed that women had become stronger and less vulnerable to mental breakdown when they were faced with real crises and when they were given meaningful work. "If the First World War was a clear-cut victory for anything," the historian David Mitchell proclaims, "it was a clear-cut victory for women's emancipation."' Furthermore, the field of psychiatry seemed more open to women's participation, to women's ideas, and to new thinking about female psy-