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Not so long ago, in the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Sunday , a freelance writer speculated about the antipathy of the film industry toward the psychiatric profession. The author's conclusion that society is ambivalent about a profession which both “fosters fear and envy even as it encourages trust and intimacy” is not particularly startling. What is remarkable, however, is the nonchalance with which the writer cited Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 film, Spellbound, as the archetypical benevolent psychiatrist of that earlier and more friendly era. An even deeper irony in this piece emerges from its title, “The Psychiatrist in Today's Movies: He's Everywhere and in Deep Trouble.” Today the psychiatric profession is nearly as male-dominated as it had been since its inception in the 1840s; therefore, to find an explanation for Hitchcock's willingness to use a woman psychiatrist as a type in his popular film of the 1940s, we need to explore the century-long effort of women to gain public and professional recognition as psychiatric practitioners.
Starting in 1869 when the first female doctor received an appointment to the staff of the Worcester Asylum in Massachusetts, women gained a precarious foothold in institutional psychiatry (virtually the only type practiced in the nineteenth century). In the late 1870s, the state of Pennsylvania appointed the first women physicians as administrator-doctors in the Harrisburg and Norristown State Hospitals and set the example for a few other states to offer positions of lesser note and power, but positions, nevertheless, and thus opportunities for psychiatric practice. By 1930 hundreds of women doctors had considerable experience within traditional psychiatry. Seemingly, they were not “movers and shakers;” Alice Bennett, Margaret Cleaves, Susan Taber, and Mary Moore Wolfe are not the ones who come to