Inventing Diseases: Kleptomania, Agoraphobia and Resistance to Modernity

Abstract

Medical practices and theories are never the purely pragmatic or scientific affairs they seem to be. Although the experts who articulate and propound them often treat them as if they were entirely unpolluted by their cultural, political and social matrices, they are deeply rooted in their specific time and culture. Kleptomania and agoraphobia, for example, which experienced a sudden heyday around 1900, were never just diseases. These diagnoses were in large part reactions to the radical modernization of society as a whole in the early twentieth century, including to the changes that this brought about in the lives of women. The following examines how kleptomania and agoraphobia were invented around 1900, and how these diseases were linked to that then-emerging symbol of modernity, the department store. These diseases have increasingly been read less as medical phenomena than as mechanisms of social control, designed to pathologize women and perpetuate their exclusion from the public sphere in an age of radical social upheaval. While German discourse on the rapid spread of the department store phenomenon was perhaps more markedly pessimistic and loaded with misogynistic stereotypes than its French or American counterparts, the birth of the department store was attended internationally by negative public attitudes. As in Germany, department stores had mushroomed in most of the larger European and American cities in the early 1900s. Designed to be highly visible and attract massive attention, they soon became an icon of urban modernity, and an important trope in the political discourses of the day that opposed modernity and capitalism, and used the department store a symbol of what was seen as the dangerous commercialization of everyday life, and an emblem of the problems of modernity. Despite negative reaction to the department store, it was an institution that played a crucial role in the evolving social identity of women in this period. For the first time, women had a more or less acceptable forum where they could not only shop but socialize with one another. In other words, department stores were one of the few places where women could move relatively freely at a time when female members of the middle and upper classes had little freedom to navigate cities on their own. To walk the streets unaccompanied was stigmatized, as is reflected by the idiomatic use of “street walking” to denote acts of prostitution. So, in an age when middle-class women could not easily leave the house alone, the department store offered a semi-respectable haven within the public realm, outside the household and church, where they could be out and about, yet not exposed to social opprobrium. As Cynthia Wright has argued, “the first department stores were a new kind of public space for bourgeois women. In addition to selling goods, many stores featured reading rooms, art galleries, and lounges where women could rest and socialize with friends [...] the equivalent for women of the downtown men’s club [...]. For this reason, some middle-class, nineteenth-century feminists celebrated the department store as an arena of freedom for women.”