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When most people picture oppression they picture a large-scale systemic legal system that bars marginalized individuals from accessing jobs or higher education. And while it is the state that facilitates and allows oppression to happen, largely for the female sex it happens within the home. This stolen autonomy and bias against women in medicine is shown particularly well in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper." One aspect of women’s oppression is that their mental health is either ignored or weaponized against them.

Taking place around the 1850’s, we are introduced by a female narrator who is never named, describing the perfection of a house she is inhabiting. Though our main character doesn’t quite think she is sick, her husband, a respected doctor, has used his authority in medicine to diagnose and prescribe treatment for her depressive illness of “hysteria” after the birth of their new baby girl. Throughout the story, her treatment is to do nothing but rest. During their stay, the unnamed author is confined to the nursery upstairs, not allowed to tend to her child, and given rules on how to properly rest. Despite her objections, she is not allowed to go out or write, and after every meal she is to lie down for an hour. Every day, the woman is more and more terrorized by thoughts of the old, yellow wallpaper in her room. She's obsessed over it and its pattern and color. She starts having delusions of a woman trapped within the wallpaper. So she carefully plans on the last night of their stay to rip all the wallpaper off, which upon the discovery causes her husband to faint. She walks over his unconscious body, almost to a kind of freedom.

From the start, her writing is confusing, volleying back and forth, like she cannot focus on one thing at a time or she is unsure of her reality. This makes it disorienting to read and makes the narrator seem unreliable. It is that uncertainty that lingers throughout the writing, almost as if she is guessing her own intelligence and never valuing it. As she explains, no one listens to her opinion on her condition, only her husband, the doctor. When talking to her husband, he treats her like a child, giving her pet names and babying her. He rejects her every concern. There comes a point in which our leading lady suggests she might not be well in her mind. Finding this unacceptable, her husband John stands up angrily and tells her not to ever think such things. He first tries to physically intimidate her, tries to censor her thoughts, then gaslights her again by asking if she trusts him “as a doctor.” This treatment of taking away all her autonomy and secluding her to only one room is what makes her lose her mind.

This story is of course based on the experiences of the author herself, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She maintained a passion for the arts and went to an art school before a man entered her life. Initially rejecting his marriage proposal, she proclaimed she had too much passion for working, and that she simply could not bear to settle down as it was not her purpose in life. Charles Walter Stetson pestered her for two years before she finally surrendered. After the birth of their child, Gilman suffered what we would now call postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis. By what one would assume was a staff of male doctors, she was prescribed the dreaded “bed rest.” She wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" to condemn this institutionalized treatment. The patriarchal role of a woman is to be a docile and submissive wife and child bearer. With this in mind, women are spoon fed a domestic life and cut out any creative activities such as reading, writing, or painting of their daily life while having a baby strapped to her hip. Upon discharge, this lack of stimulus and creative outlet sent Gilman into a nervous breakdown. She later describes, “I . . . came so near to the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” "The Yellow Wallpaper" was so moving of a piece that Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell even changed his way of treating patients, a triumphant victory for Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Medicine for women has come far, but off the backs of those before us and our knowledge of what we now know comes from the suffering of human guinea pigs or failed treatments like in most fields of medicine. Even the basis of modern gynecology comes from the sadistic torture of black enslaved women without any anesthetic. It isn’t a new from of oppression to use pseudo science to justify acts of injustice against the marginalized. Or perhaps it is the bias against the group that obstructs the ability to conduct proper scientific and medical research and practice. Its consequences have empowered men to use science as a weapon against women both systemically and in their home. Even as close as the 1950s or 60s a man could bring his wife in with complaints of hysteria. She is swiftly scapegoated for all the problems in the household and taken away to an asylum. This is where, without her consent, a male doctor can take a long needle and stab behind her eye into her brain in hopes of fixing her unruly attitude. This was a cure used on everyone, from the gay to the depressed to the disabled. While we no longer mutilate our patients, modern medicine still has a ways to go in forms of proper treatment.

I recall, that this time last year I was in a psych ward near Philly and I felt like I was punished with a “rest treatment” of my own for the crime of being suicidal. And like all criminals I was put into a prison and stripped of all small joys that made life worth living. I slept on a bed with no blankets, awoke to a shower with cold water after asking permission for the soap. I ate whatever was prepared for me, most barely edible. I didn’t even have a table to draw on between “group therapy”. There were only uncomfortable chairs to stare at the TV and time to kill between meals and bed. My treatment for my suicidal ideation had never left me so suicidal in my life.

Gilman’s experience and contribution to women’s rights is only a drop in the ocean to the plight of women throughout history and worldwide. Though, it is with every fight we win we save thousands of women and girls. As of right now there are men in power who have no real knowledge of women, using the words of “science” to justify barbaric laws against abortion and our bodies. We can only hope for a new generation of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans with their own "Yellow Wallpapers" to change our patriarchal world.

Amanda Hanahan's critical essay won third prize in the 2024 Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest.