I give Dr Maudsley (1835-1918) a bit of a hard time in Inconvenient People. He was famously inconsistent, and indeed believed that “consistency signifies prejudice and stagnation”; but by the 1880s, his views on women’s mental capacities had fossilised. He believed that we were unavoidably psychologically inferior to males – heredity allowed no other destiny. Back in 1867, he believed that he had identified the factors that had brought about the mutations that had caused this alleged female inferiority. In the January of that year an essay by Maudsley, “On Some of the Causes of Insanity”, appeared in the Journal of Mental Science, and here he gave his view that women’s mental health problems were, in fact, largely caused by male behaviour.

Man has held woman captive and dependent for his gratification, wrote Maudsley, and woman has been “made feeble by long habit of dependence”. Man appropriates her labour and enjoys the reward. Her sexual life had been developed at the expense of her intellectual life, and now that marriage had become so expensive (ie the cost of setting up a decent home for middle-class newlyweds), men were consequently delaying or avoiding marriage, and so “a fruitful source of insanity among women” had burgeoned.

Maudsley continued by claiming that the disappointment felt by a woman when she failed to achieve what had been made by men into the main aim of her life had led to the rise in female “religious mania”. Religiosity of this heightened kind, wrote Maudsley, was often “the unwitting cloak of an exaggerated and unhealthy self-feeling”. Women were less able to bear sexual deprivation than men, he believed, which led to morbidity, moodiness and irritability.

Of the 50 female case histories he had followed closely, only two were self-abusers, he stated, and even in those cases, Maudsley hadn’t believed that masturbation had been wholly the trigger of their insanity. Instead, the main cause of lunacy in women was the lack of an education that would prepare them for anything other than marriage and motherhood. Madness was the result of “the evil effects of an ill-trained mind thrown back upon itself”.

Not seeing the wood for the trees, though, Maudsley appeared to have missed the fact that female insanity rates were no higher than male, and never had been; and that many women (appalled at the legal and financial restrictions that marriage imposed upon them) were voting with their feet and choosing to stay single – or were rushing to the divorce court in unprecedented numbers to exit marriage in favour of divorcée status.

 
 Dr Henry Maudsley in his twenties, above left, and in the 1880s, above right.