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Virtually all societies that have developed beyond a hunter-gatherer level, have relegated women to a subordinate status and justified their treatment as an inevitable outgrowth of their natural inferiority. This is also true of our own civilization. Since the beginning of recorded history, philosophers, theologians, and scientists have pronounced women's “natural” inferiority, thus sanctioning and perpetuating their limited and debased status. Freud's theory of female development follows in this tradition. Indeed, Freud construed femininity as a deficiency disease.
It goes without saying that growing up in almost any patriarchal culture with its attendant belief systems has a profound effect on women's mental health. Elaine Showalter (1985) develops this theme brilliantly in her book, The Female Malady, which focuses on the history of psychiatry in England. She demonstrates how successive generations of medical scientists established theories of gender that legitimated oppressive norms for women, from the Victorian era to the present. Many women went mad in their efforts to conform to these norms. And at the same time, psychiatrists were often empowered (in the name of “science”) to diagnose and incarcerate perfectly sane women who would not or could not conform.
Despite many important gains for women during the past few decades, we continue to face challenges to our mental health. As demonstrated in the recent Presidential debates centering on family values, we are still criticized should we choose to focus some of our energy and talent outside of the domestic sphere; we have few social supports to facilitate combining Motherhood with career ambitions; we continue to fight for the right to own our bodies; we live in fear of random violent acts of hatred, such as rape and