Women, ‘madness’ and exercise

Madness

here are clouds in the painting, of course. Almost any one of us would have included those clouds, thick with electricity and rainwater. And there is the wheat field, smudged out like an empty palm, orange beneath the storm-stricken sun. Surely, many of us would have insisted on the wheat as well. Through the middle of the wheat, a rutted road slices to the horizon and disappears beneath the cl...

Women and madness: the incarceration of women in nineteenth-century France

YANNINCK RIPA, Women and madness: the incarceration of women in nineteenth-century France, transl. Catherine du Peloux Menage, Feminist Perspective Series, Cambridge and Oxford, Polity Press, 1990, pp. 175, £29.50 (0-7456-0454-4). We meet a parapraxis on p. 86: "There is a clear analogy to be drawn between asylums and hospitals and indeed it was a truism for the madwoman." Read asylums and pris...

Women and Exercise

This paper examines the social attitudes and expectations that limit women's freedom to move in the world. The history of gendered attitudes to exercise, current gendered differences in patterns of exercise and issues of body image and ageing are discussed. The importance of these issues when considering exercise as a preventative health measure is emphasised.

Wisdom, Madness and Folly

Madness and Civilisation

main theme a fascinating topic. In Renaissance Europe the insane were frequently at large. The Age of Enlightenment, coinciding with the increased growth of cities, seems to have led to their confinement?and to intensified ill-treatment. The account of these developments enables Dr. Foucault to imply that the role of the doctor as a magician and as the protagonist of society's attitudes to the ...