Now She Is Choked

Abstract

This chapter examines the chaotic lives of women committed to the asylum, and reveals how the principles of moral therapy were often undermined by the violence experienced by these patients, especially enslaved women. Domestic violence and poverty often precipitated problematic behavior and crimes like infanticide, yet asylum administrators increasingly chose to focus on female reproductive and sexual organs instead of the trauma that destabilized so many women. The asylum also promoted a racialized vision of healthy womanhood and motherhood that ignored the trauma of abuse, fostered dependency in white women, and disproportionately characterized black women as promiscuous imbeciles. This somatic emphasis on pregnancy, parturition, and puerperal fever as productive of insanity was at odds with the environmentalism of asylum medicine, but complemented the paternalism of asylum superintendents.