Are these women “sick”? Are they more “sick and tired” than medically “sick”? Why do they think they’re “sick”? Does their sickness really consist in accepting the sick role—a female prerogative in our culture? Are these women being punished for rejecting their sex-role stereotype—or for embracing it in too deadly a manner? Are they being punished for being ambivalent about their sex roles? Are their psychiatric hospitalizations merely accidental? In any event, how should they be “treated”?
Can any of these questions be answered to everyone’s satisfaction? Would any of the answers be true for all the women? Many women described ambivalence toward their sex role during and/or preceding their hospitalization. Laura may speak for them. Throughout these selected parts of the interview I have italicized some examples of typical “masculine” and “feminine” feelings or behaviors that exist very actively, side by side, in Laura. There are few places in our culture where women are actively supported for manifesting psychosexually androgynous or “male”-like behavior.
Fearfully, bravely, curiously, Laura came to talk with me one Sunday afternoon. “My mother told me to be careful,” she said, “but Lois [a mutual friend] said it would be all right.” At thirty-five, Laura “rents a room” from her mother, doesn’t “go out” any more, reads voraciously, writes poetry, and sees a male psychiatrist three times a week. Although she has an M. A. degree, she works as a secretary. She is not a feminist. Laura was twice psychiatrically hospitalized and once married. She insists that she was “mentally ill.”
LAURA: I can’t get around it. I was really sick. I began to hallucinate, I really imagined that people were against me.
PHYLLIS: Were they?
LAURA: No.
PHYLLIS: How did you feel when your mother called the police?
LAURA: At the time, at the beginning, I felt she was against me and it was brutal. It was sort of brutal, what she did. You see, I didn’t have enough money to make ends meet. I had finished graduate school and couldn’t get a job, and I was writing. I asked my mother for some money and she refused me because I was supposed to be grown up and supporting myself and, if I couldn’t, I should get married. We had a terrible fight over this and she called the police. I didn’t realize they’d lock me up, I thought my mother was bluffing. She called them because of my terrible temper—she’s intelligent enough to sense that something was wrong. The police handcuffed me and took me to Kings County. They took everything away from me, my clothes, a ring, and gave me a sedative.
PHYLLIS: Did you see a psychiatrist?
LAURA: Yes—my bad luck. He must have gotten the idea I was much worse than I really was because I started crying, bawling: everything was so horrible. This was the wrong thing to do. He took it as a sign of grave mental disturbance because I couldn’t control myself. I was a troublemaker. I tried to escape. I didn’t want to be locked up any more. But they caught me and sent me to Central Islip where they immediately gave me shock treatment three times a week. I thought I was going to die. Nobody interviewed me for a month. Only one person came to see me during the treatments—to give me an I. Q. test. I must have done very well because they transferred me to a “better building” for “special attention”—insulin therapy on top of the shock. Mornings were taken up with insulin and by the time you got through you were dead. They gave you some sugar, eggnog, to revive you, but then you were sort of exhausted for the rest of the day anyway. In the evenings we’d play cards. I was in a daze most of the time. Before they let you go or before they let you think you’re well, you have to know that you’ve been sick. And I had been sick.
PHYLLIS: How could they decide you were sick if no one talked to you very much?
LAURA: Well, I was getting accustomed to dealing with these people. I did feel different really, like my youth had gone, disappeared in the interim. Not only that, but the shock is quite potent. You can’t go through the shock and still have the same thoughts. It sort of interrupts your thoughts. You get new thoughts. My parents had been divorced for many years. The hospital was willing to let me out if someone would look after me.
PHYLLIS: Did you ever think of staying with your father?
LAURA: I can’t. My father wouldn’t have me. He doesn’t want any children around.
PHYLLIS: What about friends? Lovers?
LAURA: Well, no one had visited me. They all had their own lives. Truthfully they weren’t that concerned with me. I don’t think my experiences were so unusual in that respect. They’d come over and sleep with you for a while and then they’d go back to their own lives but I got a teaching job in another state and that’s where I met my husband. For some reason or other he wanted to marry me—you know I can’t analyze everybody’s reasons. So after a year I married him. He was the first man that really ever wanted to marry me. Love? Well, I don’t know what that is: you may think I’m a very strange person. Before he married me he asked me if I would support him while he got his doctorate. Like an idiot, I said yes. So I worked, teaching, and he went to school and after about a year and a half of marriage I started imagining again.
PHYLLIS: Imagining what?
LAURA: This time I imagined he was having an affair and I imagined people were against me. I started that again. He was spending most of his time away and when he was home he wanted a meal and sleep. We hardly ever made love.
PHYLLIS: Did you have any lovers?
LAURA: Oh no. I started imagining and then I had these temper fits where I would start breaking things and screaming at him. A couple of times he went off to sleep in a hotel. I suggested that we see a marriage counselor because I was afraid the marriage was splitting up. He went to a therapist and this time my husband put me in a hospital.
PHYLLIS: On his say-so alone?
LAURA: Yes. He came in with these muscle men and they tied me up with something and they hung up the phone—I was on the phone with my mother. I got hysterical but they wouldn’t let me talk to anybody, not even my therapist. My husband was just standing there. He knew I was scared to death of shock treatment and hospitals. I’d told him about the first time, but he thought in a private hospital they’d treat you differently. Last year I looked up my diagnosis in a medical textbook and it said I was incurable. I got very upset and took a cab up to see my therapist. I wanted to know if there was no hope for me.
PHYLLIS: Why do you think you have schizophrenia?
LAURA: Well, that’s always been the diagnosis and the prognosis is supposed to be incredibly poor. My therapist was very reassuring. He’s sometimes surprised that I’m not envious of married women, he expected me to be jealous of them all.
I think that age, as well as “unfeminine” behavior, i.e., troublesome, needy behavior, contributes to the incidence of female psychiatric hospitalization. Both Barbara and Carole attempted suicide, Barbara when she was thirteen and Carole when she was forty-five. Both were in hospitals because their families couldn’t or wouldn’t keep them, or because they didn’t have families. Both had “fighting spirit”: a trait not nurtured in families or in asylums. I am also taking the liberty of italicizing the very typically “feminine” and “masculine” behaviors that exist, side by side, very actively, in these two women.
Carole is sixty-five years old. She lives alone in a New York City welfare hotel, behind a locked door in a small room that houses a trunk filled with legal briefs and news clippings, a forbidden double burner, and an eternity of traffic noise. She has spent ten years in New York mental asylums. Her smile is dazzling, her energy mysteriously sourced. By profession, she is an actress. And, though properly brought up, and even more properly heterosexual, she never did marry.
CAROLE: From my childhood I wanted to be an actress. And the family, from the time I was sixteen, kept getting me engaged. I gave back eight rings, beautiful, big rings. I didn’t want to get just married, y’know what I mean, go in for bridge and mahjong, it wasn’t for me. They did everything they could to block me and they started this engagement business. I can�
��t remember how many wealthy boys they “arranged” for me, but the rings always went back after two or three months. My family was very strict with me, and very disappointed in me. They wouldn’t allow me to spend a night at a girl friend’s house if she had a brother. What if someone had raped their precious piece of junk? Once when I came home a little late the whole house was lit up—what a scene! You’re young, such scenes must have gone out before your time.
PHYLLIS: No, I had them too.
CAROLE: Well, they sent me to a friend who was a psychiatrist. Psychiatry isn’t learned out of textbooks. When a psychiatrist treats somebody he uses his common sense and his heart to get to the trouble. I liked him. Not all psychiatrists are like the rats in Bellevue. He had more books than I’d ever seen in one house. Finally he called my parents in and said, “I don’t want her to go to Hollywood. She’s not up to that rat race out there. They’ll take her like Grant took Richmond. I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want her to go to medical school.” My mother started laughing. She said, “You want her to be a doctor? She couldn’t even stand to see a baby diapered.” Well, by the time I was twenty-five they were tearing their hair out. “You’re an old maid, you’ve got a bad reputation, what’s gonna become of you?” So I had to cut myself off completely: Hollywood, here I come.
PHYLLIS: How did you get into a mental asylum?
CAROLE: Well, Hollywood didn’t “take” me completely. It was rough but I was able to save some money but everyone told me, “Go to New York, get yourself even a small part on the stage and they’ll, y’know, they’ll grab you back.” So I came to New York. Then I met him at an audition—a pudgy guy with sort of a good father’s face. He said he wanted to manage me. I was a “valuable piece of property.” I admit I was leery of it, I mean, there was always sex strings attached out in Hollywood with anything. As it turned out he was leading up to the sex thing. He became my business manager, got me parts. I turned checks over to him and he said, “I’ll give you just what you need.” Then suddenly he’s through! “Well, give me back the money you’ve been holding—” Nothing! Finally, I was so desperate I went over to his office. He grabbed my shoulder and beat me with his great big burly fist on my head and yelled, “Throw her out! Throw her out! Call the cops.” I was so ashamed.
PHYLLIS: Did you ever sleep with him?
CAROLE: About four or five times. I was so ashamed that I was standing there calling “All right, call the cops, let everyone know.” He ran around like a maniac. “I wasn’t a whore when I came in here looking for a job and its non-existent pay,” I yelled back at him. I was reading scripts for him too, for nothing. “But you are one, you are one,” he yelled, with his fist up in the air. “Yes, it took a dirty, filthy, slimy thing like you to make one out of me.” I ran out. I just lay crying at home for days. Some friends wanted to go over and beat him up. I said no—I was too ashamed. I was behind in my rent, I was physically run down, I just couldn’t handle things. I went to the Diplomat Hotel and paid for two days in advance. I told them, “I’m very tired, I don’t want to receive any telephone calls,” and I hung up the “Don’t Disturb” sign on the door and took phenobarbital and seconal. It was five-twenty-five when I last saw the clock and went off to sleep. I woke up five days later in Bellevue at night. They were hurling questions at me. “Why did you do it? Do you know where you are?” I hurt so badly. I couldn’t walk, my vision was blurred.
Carole was medically injured and medically neglected. At her commitment hearing—she had insisted upon one—the judge asked whether “there was anyone to take care” of her.
CAROLE: I said no. I didn’t want my aunts or my mother to know anything like this. And he says, “Well, you’ll need some more treatment.” And this bastard [a psychiatrist] gets up and says, “Well, in any state hospital she can get medical treatment.” They’d hung this label of involutional psychosis and schizoid personality on me. I could barely walk but was I aggressive, was I uncooperative! That’s the big one, if you’re uncooperative, you’re crazy. I knew I wouldn’t get medical treatment in a state looney bin so I asked the judge to have me killed if he wouldn’t free me. Well, that did it. I begged the judge, “Don’t do this,” but he sent me to the state asylum.
Barbara is nineteen and by conventional standards, very beautiful. She dresses in high-hippie fashion: a slender, human mobile of leather, suede, brass, and silver. She is newly a mother and couldn’t talk for very long the first time we met: her husband wanted her back home as soon as possible. She chain-smoked and drank coffee and blew jokes at me like soap bubbles. Then she got very serious.
PHYLLIS: Why were you put into the hospital?
BARBARA: Because I tried to kill myself. There was too much pressure on me [she was thirteen at the time]. My father deserted us and I think my mother loved us but she had too many problems. She couldn’t function. She put me in foster homes and my father would come to visit and tell me she didn’t love me and I’d end up crying. I had foster fathers and all these weird foster parents that wouldn’t feed you. I couldn’t believe what was actually happening to me. When I got older and went to Catholic school, I was weird by that time. I wasn’t a normal happy child and I used to get beat up by this nun who heard that my mother was spreading bad stories about her and I didn’t have any friends and I was alone. My mother drank and tried to kill herself every once in a while. I gave my mother a very hard time. I stayed out till four or five in the morning when I was thirteen. I finally got shipped to Creedmoor to the children’s ward.
PHYLLIS: How long were you there?
BARBARA: About five or six months, and then there was a head nurse, who, if the girls gave her too much of a hard time, would see that something was done about it. Some of her privileges would be taken away or she would be beat up. I had personal experience—to have the head nurse disapprove is a very bad thing in these hospitals. I had gotten beat up a few times myself. One girl had taken my mascara and she said she lost it so the head nurse said, “Are you going to let her get away with it?” We played a punch game where one girl got punched on the arm. We had to hold her and punch her on the arm—really sick things. The attendants were more messed up than the patients were.
I escaped from Creedmoor twice. A detective found me. I was staying with some people I knew from the hospital and her (my girl friend’s) uncle tried to rape me and I broke his finger. Then I called up the head nurse at Creedmoor and asked to come back. This time I didn’t have any trouble with the doctor or the head nurse or the social worker. I got along fine. I didn’t mess up the ward.
PHYLLIS: Did you go to school while you were there?
BARBARA: From ten to twelve in the morning. It was called junior scholastic—it was real bad. They told me not to make things rough—to cooperate, etc., or else I’d have a hard time. I was standing in line getting toothbrushes or something and they gave me a big cup of liquid thorazine to drink plus some other thing and I passed out. I didn’t know what it was at the time. I found out later that you could have momentary blackouts from too much thorazine. I woke up in bed and went to the nurse to ask her for something to make me feel better and she said, “You better get back to bed or I’m going to stick a needle up your ass.”
These chronically ill women—they used to lock them up in the bathroom. They’d never get their clothes changed. They used to urinate all over them. When the visitors came they would give them a bath and tell them that “she’s doing just fine.” I went down and told the supervisor that they were giving me more medication than they should and she told me that if I open my mouth one more time she would shut it for good. It was just horrible. We cleaned the wards for two weeks before an official inspection.
They’d put the patients in seclusion without a bedpan or anything and then they wanted us to clean it up and I wasn’t going to do it. They wanted me to put the diarrhea in a coffee can. If you are not really flipped out, it’s very hard to stay and some had to stay for very long periods of time as no one really wants them
.
I got involved with a girl there—sexually involved—when I was seventeen and there was nothing they could do about it. There was no kind of counseling, which I needed, and which this girl needed. They took this girl and asked if I ever had an orgasm with her and she said yes, which I did. It was a very sick relationship and not normal and when I was seventeen I couldn’t figure out whether or not I was still gay. There was nobody I could talk to about it.
When I told my English teacher all the things that happened at Creedmoor, she didn’t believe it. She thought I was lying when I told her about being beaten up and giving me all those drugs to put me into a state of helplessness. People are afraid of any people who are different from them. I didn’t need to be at Creedmoor if there was someplace else for me to go to.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LESBIANS
Not counting my mother, my first lesbian experience took place when I was eight years old. After school, Ann would come over to my house and weave magic tales of what some boys had done to her the previous night. I asked many questions and so Ann would show me, kiss by kiss, caress by caress, what had actually happened. Of course, we both “graduated” to boys and had to put away our “childhood games.”
Two years ago I met Ann, working as a bank teller. She was very pregnant and quickly told me all about her husband, her husband’s job, her husband’s down payment on a ranch house, and her husband’s plans for a summer vacation. “Hey, Annie,” I wanted to say, “do you remember those great kisses?” But I didn’t. I remained silent.
I dedicate this chapter to the breaking of that silence between women.
The love of women for their own sex was equivalent to … orphic [homosexuality]. Here again the sole purpose was to transcend the lower sensuality, to make physical beauty into a purified psychic beauty. [In] Sappho’s strivings to elevate her sex … she was concerned not with one alone; Eros drove her to them all…. Wherever she found physical beauty, Eros impelled her to create spiritual beauty as well…. In the presence of this idea she came to look with indifference on everything she had valued as a young girl, wealth, jewels, the ornaments of outward sweet existence.
Women and Madness Page 26
