How long does it take to read The Female Malady?
The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter takes about 5 hours 43 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 43 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1985. 312 pages, about 85,800 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 32 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 43 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In this informative, timely and often harrowing study, Elaine Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about 'proper' feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women 'to their senses', she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing, to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness. Highly original and beautifully written, The Female Malady is a vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.
Subjects: Mental health, Mental health services, Psychiatry, History, Women, Women, mental health
