Women’s Rhetorical Interventions in the Economic Rhetoric of Neurasthenia analyzes how turn-of-the-century American women writers used the rhetoric of neurasthenia to negotiate their disabilities and argue for renewed understandings of women’s work. At this crucial moment, neurasthenia was a commonly diagnosed disease, most common amongst elite intellectuals and women, writers and other cultural producers, “brain-workers” rather than muscle workers. In order to describe neurasthenia to doctors and the larger American public, Dr. George M. Beard, a prominent neurologist, constructed an economic metaphor, in which individuals possessed a finite amount of “nerve-force” that could be saved or spent, reinvested or wasted. When stores of nerve-force were low, individuals could experience “nervous bankruptcy.” This metaphor formed the basis for what became, according to scholar Tom Lutz, a “discourse” by which individuals could negotiate their reactions to the large-scale changes taking place during this historical moment. Alice James, Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were each diagnosed with and treated for neurasthenia and used neurasthenic rhetoric to discuss their disabilities. This rhetoric allowed them not only an “available means” by which to understand and negotiate their ailments but also the language to think about women and economics as well as make arguments about women’s disability and women’s work. This study asks how these women used this language to talk about their disabilities in ways the larger culture could understand and challenge medical assumptions about women with disabilities at a time when most doctors were male and the prescribed treatment for women involved isolating them in houses or bedrooms for six to eight weeks just as they were rallying for opportunities for higher education and public work.
There is no single pattern of how this rhetoric was used; each woman used the language in her own way. James used the economic metaphor to secure an identity outside of “invalid,” to challenge male medical conceptions of women’s disabilities and establish her worth. Addams developed the ability to “affectionately interpret” the poor of East Chicago and to understand that women’s and society’s health relied on a balance of different kinds of work—manual and intellectual labor. Gilman challenged the ingenious of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure” treatment and argued for the importance and necessity of women’s public work. Each author posed important challenges to the ideological positions of the male medical establishment and turn-of-the-century American culture. Each of my chapters builds on the next to show how these writers responded to, challenged and used dominant discourse to for their own rhetorical purposes and, in so doing, constructed an early disability rhetoric.