Diagnosing Anger: The “Angry Woman Syndrome” and the Medicalization of Women’s Emotions

Scholars have shown how medical doctors, and especially psychiatrists, pathologized protest by associating opposition to social order or authorities to psychiatric categories; for example, when US psychiatrists diagnosed many Black men as schizophrenic and psychotic in the context of the Civil Rights movement (Metzl 2009); or when psychiatrists considered feminists as exhibiting pathological traits requiring psychotherapy and drug treatments (Herman 1995; Chesler 2005[1972]). The sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg and the psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham accused feminism of being a “deep illness” requiring “a massive psychotherapy campaign aimed at controlling the outbreak of female independence and ensuring compliant maternalism in the future.” (Herman 1995, p. 279).

This paper will examine the medical history of the pathologization of anger and of behaviors perceived as contrarian by doctors through the history of two diagnoses: the “angry woman syndrome” (Rickles 1971) and the premenstrual syndrome (PMS), including its psychiatric version, the premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). The first category was not formally considered by the psychiatric profession but by one psychiatrist, Nathan K. Rickles, and was never included in an official classification, but I will argue that this proposal is illustrative of clinical discriminations encountered by women expressing “negative” emotions; the second has a non-linear history: contested by feminist activists and psychologists, it was nonetheless included in the DSM, the psychiatric manual of mental disorders, but also appears now as being claimed by affected women. What can these histories tell us about the feminist politics of emotions?