Unattached and Unhinged: The Spinster and the Psychiatrist in Liberal Italy, 1860–1922

Abstract

This article explores the role nineteenth‐century Italian psychiatric sciences played in shaping attitudes towards adult women who never married. Initially in post‐unification Italy unmarried women were largely invisible, while the bachelor appeared to threaten the newly formed nation's fragile political and social stability. In the last decades of the nineteenth century fears about the bachelor faded, replaced by growing concerns about the social dangers posed by the ‘spinster’. Drawing on writings from psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists, on patient records from psychiatric asylums as well as popular literature, this article traces the way psychiatric practice and theories transformed the image of the unmarried single woman.

Insult to Injury? Women and Mental Disorder in Italian Photography and Visual Culture

“…As Linda Reeder (2012) explains, in post-Unification Italy, “Italian psychiatry aligned itself with the growing positivist movement, reaching out to experts in anthropology, psychology, sociology and criminology who also believed in the power of science to fix pressing social, economic and political problems” (p. 193). Almost from its invention photography was closely associated with positivist psychiatry, which used the medium both to “guarantee scientific knowledge” through its supposed objectivity and classificatory power and to fuel “the illusion that it was able to control mental illness through mental hospitals” ( Manzoli, 2004 , sec.…”

“…The Italian numbers show increasing patterns of confinement from this period onward. By 1874, 12,210 Italians were in psychiatric institutions, and by 1899 this number had increased to 36,931 ( Reeder, 2012 , p. 193). Law 36 had decreed that Italians with mental illness must be committed to an institution “when they are dangerous to themselves or others, or arouse public scandal and cannot be conveniently guarded and treated except in asylums.” 5 All it took for this to occur was a claim that a person was “dangerous” or a source of “public scandal,” and a medical certificate signed by the local public safety authority presented to a magistrate.…”

“…Her slumping, sad figure conforms to the diagnostic visual stereotypes that informed psychiatric practice at this time, but which in fact stretch back to far older iconographies, such as representations of melancholy like Albrecht Dürer's 1514 Melencholia I ( Figure 3 ), which Sander Gilman (1982) noted as a key iconographical precedent for more contemporary representations of melancholy and depression in one of his pioneering works on the history of stereotypes (p. 2). Chronic melancholy was a common diagnosis for late nineteenth-century women, particularly unmarried women in their late twenties or older, in whom it was seen as a scientifically demonstrable response to their inability to form a lasting attachment to a man ( Reeder, 2012 , p. 197). This despite the fact that in many cases these women were victims of sexual violence and/or domestic abuse.…”

Living alone in nineteenth-century rural Italy: was there any way out?

“…35 The concern over unmarried women living alone was especially typical of patrilineal societies, in which the reproductive role of women, on the one hand, and the male control over it, on the other hand 36 were necessary elements in order to secure the social and biological continuity of the family group. 37 Singleness was definitely accepted when it was the consequence of a family decision, a condition imposed on a household member within a broader family strategy. Sharecropping households, in fact, needed to control family size in order to avoid eviction from the farm, which led them to take preventive measures aimed at discouraging some family members from marrying.…”