Mad Women Research Articles

Two Book Reviews: Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style & the 1960s and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the 60s and Beyond

Two Book Reviews: Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style & the 1960s and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the 60s and Beyond

REVIEW: Meticulous study of early colonial infanticide

Every once in a while an academic researcher will privately concede they would like to have written the book they have reviewed. Count me in that category. Nicola Goc’s examination of news narratives of infanticide from 1822-1922 in Britain and Australia reveals painstaking scholarship. It yields insights into the primacy of crime news, the ideology of infanticide news discourse, the privileging of medical and legal voices in courtroom reportage, and the personification of infanticide women as maternal deviants, mad women or as celebrity subjects of newspaper campaigning.

Book Review: Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ‘60s and Beyond

Book Review: Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ‘60s and Beyond

The Mad Men in the Attic: Seriality and Identity in the Narrative of Capitalist Globalization

This essay connects the television series Mad Men to Anthony Trollope’s Prime Minister and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. All are serialized narratives of capitalist globalization in which motifs of exile articulate the experience of breached sovereignty in a modern world. Mad Men belongs to a long line of naturalist narratives in which the outsider within (often a Jew or probable Jew) assimilates the myriad impacts of capitalist globalization and thus exemplifies the periodic resurgence of historical realism, which Georg Lukács predicted in The Historical Novel. Serial forms synchronize naturalist representation through a slow temporality that enables viewers and characters to share a deferred longing for the social transformations once symbolized by the 1960s. Mad Men’s objective situation is today’s neoliberal condition, connected to the longue durée of capitalist and imperial unfolding through the recurrence of Judaized otherness and virtualized Jewishness. Don Draper is a virtual Jew in whom the minority subject’s aberrant particularity and the majority subject’s universalist status collide, but serial forms like montage synchronize Don’s virtual condition with the experiences of the show’s “mad women.” Like Emma Bovary, Don is a “madwoman in the attic,” for whom aestheticism and adultery are the sole consolations for the experience of singing for one’s captors.

Essay Review: Psychiatry in colonial Australia: mad women and their attendants in Victoria’s asylums, 1848—88

Essay Review: Psychiatry in colonial Australia: mad women and their attendants in Victoria’s asylums, 1848—88

Placing the ‘mad woman’: troubling cultural representations of being a woman with mental illness in Girl Interrupted

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.

“Womanhood Under the Magnifying Glass\": A look at Insanity Among Women in African Literature and Society

Every society has its own challenges and aspirations, but how these are handled makes a lot of difference. The approach to issues, the nature of the issues and the outcome of such issues are very crucial to the development and peace of the society. Africa as a Third World continent so to say has come a full circle with the good, the bad and the ugly just like any other continent of the world. The difference with Africa's case may be the nature and approach to problems plaguing the continent. Africa is blessed with both natural and human resources---especially with crude oil and other mineral resources and a huge population. The continent is vast in land mass; she is blessed with good climatic condition, vibrant soil suitable for agriculture and a lot more. Yet the continent is under developed. This paper attempts an appraisal of issues that may have accounted for this underdevelopment over the years by looking at the position of mad women in this society and what would have been their contributions, economically, socially and politically to the development of the continent. Using the theory of “otherness” signifying exclusion as propounded by Simone de Beauvior, the paper brings out the plight of these “unwanted” in society and evaluates what they are worth in literary texts and in the society. Keywords: Womanhood, InsanityGender & Behaviour Vol. 6 (2) 2008: pp. 1689-1701

Mad Women?: Marketing in the Age of the Female Economy

Mad Women?: Marketing in the Age of the Female Economy

MY OTHER, MY SELF

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For work that begins to explore the relationship between feminism and popular culture, see also Gamman Gamman , Lorraine , and Margaret Marshment 1988 . The female gaze . London : Women's Press . [Google Scholar] and Marshment's edited collection The Female Gaze (1988). 2. Disturbingly, perhaps, Hermes entertains the possibility that the way magazines are read in the unfocused flurry of everyday life renders them ‘virtually meaningless’. That potentially nihilistic insight for media and cultural studies’ concern with the reception of popular texts has been left hanging on the page. 3. There is no archive of Cleo letters beyond those that were published. Popular magazines rarely consider their own future historical value in the immediacy of deadlines and the continual present of magazine publishing. Nor would the publishing company, Australian Consolidated Press, allow me access to whatever documents may have been kept relating to Cleo. This lack of co-operation with researchers is one that Bridget Griffin-Foley also met when writing The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (1999). 4. Issues of authenticity, selection and editing letters in magazines demand an article in their own right. Given the popular mythology that readers’ letters to magazines are invented by staff writers, it is probably worth stressing here that this is simply not the case with Cleo and with many (if not all) magazines. I have yet to interview Ita Buttrose and other staff formally, but informal conversation indicates a respect for the editorial function of the letters page to create a public forum, to increase magazine loyalty and ‘brand’ identification, and to allow readers to feel ownership and inclusion in ‘their’ magazine. There is a principle of trust involved with publishing readers’ letters, and it is one that women's magazines like Cleo took seriously. If readers’ letters were written in-house, and if that practice leaked into the public domain, the trust between readers and their magazine would be broken. 5. Here I use the broader definition of consciousness-raising as defined by Meryl Altman: ‘… a belief in the liberating potential of speaking openly about women's lives, starting with one's own and moving outward to connect with others’ (Altman 2003 Altman , Meryl. 2003 . Beyond trashiness: The sexual language of 1970s feminist fiction . Journal of International Women's Studies 4 ( 2 ): 1 – 19 . Available from http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/April03/Altman.pdf [cited 10 February 2007] . [Google Scholar], 2). 6. The Australian Women's Weekly was the most-read magazine, reaching 34.1 per cent of Australians. Cosmopolitan, Cleo's most direct niche competitor, and at that point a little over a year old in Australia, was read by 4.9 per cent. 7. Dr Beverly Raphael was Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Sydney in 1975. After an illustrious career in the mental health service sector, she now holds many professorial appointments at a number of Australian universities. 8. Edna Ryan was involved at this time in the Industrial Action group of WEL. It was her submission to the Arbitration Commission in 1974 that succeeded in removing the legal concept of the male family wage, replacing it with the adult minimum wage. 9. By 1976, 36 per cent of the Australian workforce was female and, of that number, 64 per cent were married women (Matthews 1984 Matthews , Jill Julius. 1984 . Good and mad women. The historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia . North Sydney : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar], 54). 10. It is pointed that Dasey does not identify as a feminist in her editorial letter, but as part of ‘the women's movement’, a by-word in Cleo for the less militant, more ‘respectably’ mainstream manifestation of women's liberation. 11. There is no space here to explore the mainstreaming of sexual liberation in Cleo and its contentious relationship to second-wave feminism, but that too is part of the meaning of popular feminism and part of its trajectory into the present.

"That House of Proud Mad Women!": Diseased Legacy and Mythmaking in Marina Carr's "The Mai"

"That House of Proud Mad Women!": Diseased Legacy and Mythmaking in Marina Carr's "The Mai"

Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work and Culture ed. by Linda V. Troost, and: Women Writing 1550–1750 ed. by Jo Wallwork, Paul Salzman (review)

MLR, 105.1, 2010 203 Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in theirLives,Work, and Culture, vol. v. Ed. by Linda V. Troost. New York: AMS. 2008. x+326 pp. $124.50. ISBN 978 0-404-64705-6. Eighteenth-Century Women is an annual essay collection with a few reviews, now up to its fifth volume. Although the subjects engage with different areas, the whole enterprise reminds one of the need?perhaps increasing in an age of gender studies?to think about women aswomen. Several essays deal with representations ofwomen bymen. Charles Haskell Hinnant looks at allegorical portraits ofRestora tion court beauties, particularly Sir Peter Lely's depictions of Barbara Villiers, in the light of political and sexual currents swirling round their sitters' reputations, to illuminate their complicated public postures. JuliaDabbs looks at stories about Italian women artists?Giovanna Fratellini, Maria Barbo (aminiaturist), and Ros alba Carriera?to show that 'therewas a price that thewoman artist paid forbeing gifted, at least according to her male biographers, and thatwas ugliness' (p. 37). Logan JamesConnors reads a couple of plays byMarivaux and Diderot topropose that the former has amore gynocentric dynamic, though his discussion of female agency on stage is so lightly contextualized?there isnothing about the process of production or reception?that more questions are raised than answered. The other essays are on stronger ground with a different sort of suggestiveness?discussions ofwomen's lives are used to frame discussion ofworks, and vice versa. One might wish for more explicit theorizing of relations between lives,works, and culture but thematerials do supplymuch practical food for thought.Marilyn Francus's careful study of Elizabeth Allen Burney, Frances Burney's stepmother, iswittily entitled 'Stepmommy Dearest', and makes a persuasive case for a woman who deserves a better press than she got from the Burney offspring. The essays do not overtly have much in common, apart from a general commit ment to eighteenth-century women, but the volume does set up some interesting resonances. An essay by Pam Lieske on Magdalen House narratives and their sig nificance for Frances Sheridan's life and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph keeps fallen women in view; though Lieske reads the novel rather debatably as rela tively closed to ambiguity, the ideological charge around prostitution is felt. It resurfaces in Laura Engel's essay on Mary Wells, around mad women. Wells's life was extraordinary?theatrical on stage and off, she puzzled and frustrated her contemporaries: was she mad? Or acting mad? When she retreated at one point to the north coast ofNorfolk, the locals took her forMarie Antoinette: how else to explain beauty, elegance, rich clothes, and broken English? Lieske comments: 'Wells's mockery ofmajesty reflects her own desire to be worshipped at the same time thather subversive performance demonstrates that theperception of royalty is artificial?anyone can play a queen' (p. 200). Queens, fallenwomen, mad women? women's agency is fragile in the eighteenth century, and both fallen women and mad women were likely to have their children taken away. Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Stael fly the flag for powerful intellectual women?the former's play VEntree du Dumouriez a Bruxelles, described as a la 204 Reviews Shakespeare' by one reviewer (and not approvingly!), is discussed byMegan Con way as a chauvinist epic, which failed on the stage in part because of the authors vigorous stand against the execution of Louis XVI. When Dumouriez defected to theAustrians later in 1793, an 'unfortunate choice of protagonists', as Conway puts it (p. 235) saw de Gouge herself condemned to the guillotine. The French Revo lution provides Madelyn Gurtwith with two further occasions to discuss women's agency: Chenier's play about Charles IX which associated Marie-Antoinette ne gatively with theMedici, and Francois Chabot versus Claire Lacombe in a fierce rhetorical clash.What Gutwith calls 'small but smoldering' (p. 237) moments par ticularize the expulsion ofwomen from public life in republic and monarchy That sets up nicely the final essay, by Barbara Ann Day-Hickman, on de StaeT's relations with du Pont de Nemours, a fellow liberal and friendwho proved unsympathetic about her exile and her troubles; tactlessly he wrote thathe wished he had her time to...

The Mad Body as the Text of Culture in the Writings of Mary Lamb

The Lamb who was mad, bad, and dangerous to know has not received much purchase in the Lamb biographies or literary criticism to date. That this should be so is understandable. The silence that surrounded the facts of Lamb's madness until after she died in 1847was partiallygrounded in what Katherine Anthony calls a conspiracy by the Lamb family and literary friends to repress, for Lamb's sake, the gruesome events of that afternoon of 22 September 1796 when she stabbed her mother Elizabeth to death with a carving knife. Anthony says that the silence held for so long that almost causes one a shock to findJohn Hollingshead saying in his Memoirs in 1895 that murdered her mother.1 Out of this silence developed the idealized portrait of Lamb as the most reasonable of women who by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene than her brother's, guided him and protected him with her almost legendary practical mind.2 Henry Fuseli may have broken this silence with his sketch of a woman, arm raised, stiletto poised in her right hand, a leg of a deer in her left. Her face wears a dark expression of frenzied delight as it looks out past the frame of the picture; behind her a male face gasps in apparent horror. Visible sketches of previous positions of the woman's hand holding the knife give the picture an eerie quality of movement, as though we can see the hand with the knife move across the woman's chest toward her victim. At the top of the sketch, close to the head of the woman, an inscription in an unknown hand reads Mary Anne Lamb.3 In Mad Women and Romantic Writing, Philip Martin notes that if Lamb's violent figure haunts the Romantic period in the way that Fuseli's sketch suggests it did, then this terrifying figure not only breaches early-nineteenth-century decorum, but also

Good and mad women (teachers): the case of Grace Neven

Good and mad women (teachers): the case of Grace Neven

Good and mad women (teachers): The case of Grace Neven

Good and mad women (teachers): The case of Grace Neven

Mad Women in the Tropics

Mad Women in the Tropics

Mad Women in Romantic Writing. Philip W. Martin.

<i>Mad Women in Romantic Writing</i>. Philip W. Martin.

Mad Women in Romantic Writing. By P. W. Martin. (Pp. 198; illustrated; £29.95). Harvester Press: Brighton. 1988.

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STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN FEDERATION. Secession: The Ultimate States Right. By Gregory Craven

Book reviewed in this article:GODLINESS AND GOOD ORDER. A HISTORY OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA. By David HilliardA PLACE OF LIGHT AND LEARNING. The University of Queensland's First Seventy‐five Years. By Malcolm ThomisTHE WHITLAM PHENOMENON. Fabian PapersHIGH HOPES: THE MEN AND MOTIVES OF THE AUSTRALIAN ROUND TABLE. By Leonie FosterTHE AUSTRALIAN PEACE MOVEMENT: A SHORT HISTORY. By Malcolm Saunders and Ralph SummyWHITE WOMEN IN FIJI 1835–1930. The Ruin of Empire? By Claudia KnapmanKANAKA. A HISTORY OF MELANESIAN MACKAY. By Clive MooreGOOD AND MAD WOMEN: the Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia. By Jill Julius MatthewsRATIONS, RESIDENCE, RESOURCES. A History of Social Welfare in South Australia since 1836. By Brian Dickey with contributions from Elaine Martin and Rod OxenberryASBESTOS—ITS HUMAN COST. By Jock McCullochFROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE. A Biography of Michael Joseph Savage. By Barry GustafsonAMERICAN LAKE: NUCLEAR PERIL IN THE PACIFIC. By Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky, Walden BelloPROTEST AND DISSENT IN THE COLONIAL PACIFIC. By Peter Hempenstall and Noel RutherfordWAR WITHOUT MERCY: RACE AND POWER IN THE PACIFIC WAR. By John W. DowerASIA'S NEW INDUSTRIAL WORLD. By Michael Smith, Jane McLoughlin, Peter Large and Rod ChapmanRED BROTHERHOOD AT WAR: Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon. By Grant Evans and Kelvin RowleyTHE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION IN AMERICA: CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR PAST. By Russell L. HansonTHE ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN DISSENT. By R.I. MooreTHE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF APPEASEMENT: BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1930s. By Gustav SchmidtPOPULAR OPPOSITION TO THE 1834 POOR LAW. By John KnottTHE UNION OF ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 1603–1608. By Bruce GallowayWEALTH AND VIRTUE: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Edited by Isrvan Hont and Michael IgnatieffPÉTAIN: HERO OR TRAITOR? The Untold Story. By Herbert R. LottmanTHE POLICIES OF GENOCIDE: JEWS AND SOVIET PRISONERS OF WAR IN NAZI GERMANY. Edited by Gerhard HirschfeldFATEFUL MONTHS. Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution. By Christopher R. BrowningTHE CRISIS ZONE OF EUROPE. An interpretation of east‐central European history in the first half of the twentieth century. By Ivan T. BerendOPEC: The Failing Giant. By Mohammed E. AhrariWOMEN AND CLASS IN AFRICA. Edited by Claire Robertson and Iris BergerINDEPENDENT AFRICA AND THE WORLD. By Peter CalvocoressiSOUTH AFRICA: A Plural Society in Transition. Edited by D.J. Van Vuuren, N.E. Wiehahn, J.A. Lombard and N.J. RhoodieARGENTINA: ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES. By Gary W. WyniaPOLITICAL THOUGHT IN MODERN INDIA. By Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. DeutschCLAUSEWITZ AND THE STATE. By Peter ParetREVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND LOCKE'S TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT. By Richard AshcraftIDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE. Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism. By Brian William HeadTHE LONGING FOR TOTAL REVOLUTION: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. By Bernard YackTHE IDEOLOGY OF THE NEW RIGHT. Edited by Ruth LevitasPROTECTING THE VULNERABLE. A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. By Robert E. GoodinPOLITICAL TOLERANCE IN CONTEXT. Support for Unpopular Minorities in Israel, New Zealand, and the United States. By John L. Sullivan, Michael Shamir, Patrick Welsh, and Nigel S. RobertsSEXISM, RACISM AND OPPRESSION. By Arthur Brittain and Mary MaynardCABINET. By Peter HennessyADMINISTRATIVE ANALYSIS: An Introduction to Rules, Enforcement and OrganisationsThe Restrospective National Bibliography (RNB) Project

Woman and home in Australia

Jill Julius Matthews, Good and mad women: the historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia (George Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1984; Kerreen Reiger, The disenchantment of the home: modernising the Australian family 1880–1940 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1985.

Book Review: Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia Jill

Part 1 Good women and failure feminist theory and historical methodology patterns of probability. Part 2 Constructing the ideal of femininity: economy ideology management of the gender order. Part 3 Living the impossibility of femininity: sexuality work mothering. Part 4 Conclusion.