Abstract
Gender and class are integral elements in any study of British society and culture, and nowhere is this more true than with regard to the segregated communities of late Victorian and Edwardian asylums. The subtle and complex impacts of these elements on institutional administration as well as on the daily life of the asylum can daunt many researchers, yet Louise Hide tackles them admirably in this new study of English asylums.
Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 is a successful transition in Hide’s research interests. Her continued interest in London County Council (LCC) asylums at the turn of the century and a more in-depth exploration of institutional records and reports and minutes of the various psychiatric authorities has given this study a temporal and geographical expertise which is not lost amid the wider context of British asylum care.
Nevertheless, recovering the experiences of patients and staff is a notoriously difficult task, which leads us to approach Hide’s exploration of the lives of patients and staff rather cautiously. Yet her ethnographic approach largely fulfils its promises, and scatters fascinating insights throughout a narrative mostly dominated by the asylum staff. This admittedly is weighted towards the second half of the monograph, yet lends itself to the overall structure. Chapter one simultaneously charts the impact of changing social, economic and medical landscapes on admission profiles for the LCC and challenges the place of Victorian social rigidity in the face of permeable asylum boundaries. Chapters two and three begin to unravel how relationships in the asylum were formed, and the realities of power and authority between the different levels of staff and the patients.
With these structures exposed, the greatest strength of Hide’s study is her illumination of the operation of what one might term ‘illegitimate’ or ‘covert’ power structures. Contributing to a historiographical tradition which presents the distinctions placed between staff and patients in the asylum as mostly artificial, Hide explores the similarities between staff and patients and the influence of gender and class over their daily lives. For instance, she describes the undermining of the figurehead of the asylum, the resident superintendent, by distinctive gendered cultures cultivated between patients and staff – from the homosocial community of attendants and male patients, the dynamics of which were dictated by class (p. 173), to the autonomy the matron held over female patients but whose authority was later reduced to the female staff (pp. 59, 68).
Hide’s study could also be significant to recent research on male repression and feminization. She places a theme, which has been dominated in the literature by the world wars, servicemen and nervous disorders, within a new context: daily life in the English asylum. The relationship between gendered behaviour and a punishment and reward system in ‘rehabilitating’ patients for life outside the asylum has been the subject of previous studies, yet Hide colours this discussion with the humiliation and degradation of men in particular. Strong-dresses, for example, limited the movement of patients and made them conspicuous on the ward, and were emasculating for men (p. 101). ‘Aware’ working-class men were stripped of both pride and power as they were removed from their working life and as provider for their family, and any refusal to work in a system they resented and did not understand was interpreted as resistive (p. 114). Staff were not exempt, and traditional power structures were subverted in the authority of female general nurses over several male staff (p. 88).
This discussion could have been fruitfully extended. The feminizing and infantilizing of men – patients and staff alike – centres mostly around the presence of female staff and the use of punishments to coerce adherence to the asylum regime. Yet discussions of tensions between masculinity and asylum life could have benefited from deeper consideration of the clinical angle. Condition- and often region-specific studies, including those of Coleborne (2014), Møllerhøj (2009) and Loughran (2008), would have provided some interesting comparisons among the distinctive conditions surrounding LCC asylums and patients’ experiences therein. Gendered diagnoses, in particular, not only shaped how psychiatric professionals interpreted a patient’s behaviour and how these patients were understood by asylum staff, but also their own self-identity and subsequent responses to institutional life.
It is predominantly through women in the asylum therefore, and particularly female staff, that Hide redresses the literature. Although gendered constructs ultimately eliminated the role of the lady doctor at Bexley from 1901 (p. 60), Hide unearths a fascinating picture of empowered women who entered the asylum earning higher wages than many male attendants and were often given more authority, especially as general nursing became increasingly valuable to asylum care. The employment of female nurses in male wards may have been more established in Scotland, yet Hide writes a wonderful discussion on the impact of asylum-care – particularly when in the hands of women – on the male ego, and their experiences of the asylum ‘community’. Less attention, however, is given to the impact that female nurses had on the recovery rates of male patients. This would have created an interesting discussion, not only about women, work and the asylum, but could have also shed light on the psychological relationship between the male ego, masculinity and recovery.
Hide’s monograph is engaging and comprehensive, if somewhat limited in its regional scope. As such it opens some interesting avenues for further research into British asylums in the late-Victorian and early-Edwardian period. Were similar power structures and blurred distinctions facts of daily life in British asylums outwith the particular circumstances of the LCC, say for example in Scotland where asylum care was pushing towards a model of care similar to the general hospital? Moreover, questions over masculinity and the efficacy of care during such a critical period in British asylum history would be a welcome and fascinating extension of Hide’s research here. Nevertheless, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 is an essential read for those beginning to grapple with the place of gender and class in British asylums.