Showlater demonstrates how cultural ideas ab out 'proper' feminie behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 yars, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women 'to their senses', she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness.