Note: This post originally appeared on the In Her Own Right: A Century of Women’s Activism, 1820-1920 blog on 30 March 2020.
Many of the materials included as part of In Her Own Right represent women who fought for equal rights, jobs, and education in a man’s world. However, the Sophia Perry diaries give voice to another overlooked part of the population: (women) patients in mental institutions.
– by Wood Institute travel grantee Alexandra Prince*
If you meet a new acquaintance at a party and one of the first things they share about themselves is their membership in a newly-formed religious group, you are going to assume a few things. You might be polite enough to mask your raised eyebrows with an innocent follow-up question such as, “What is the name of the group?” Or, “What is it that you believe exactly?” But I bet that, behind your polite inquiry, you are likely wondering if they might be crazy, or if they are nuts or have a screw loose or suffer from a mental illness, or any other variety of descriptive phrases or terms we assign to people whose minds we deem not to be “normal.”
My research at the Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the spring of 2018 concerned the history behind this presumption that members in new religious movements are insane or somehow mentally unsound. Where did this link between religion and pathology emerge? And why are we so quick to assign mental illness to those who espouse divergent religious beliefs? To better understand the pathological frameworks we often use when discussing religion, my dissertation examines how this assumption was historically shaped. To do so, I examined the Library’s collection of archival documents relating to religion and madness during the nineteenth century.