I have recently learned that women who were asserting themselves in their marriages were often committed involuntarily to insane asylums during the late 1800s through the early 1900s. A newspaper account presented the details of a woman who was confined many years against her will at a private asylum. Eventually she was able to gain her release through the support of a sympathetic attorney. Another newspaper account reported the sad case of a woman who threw herself in front of a train days before she was supposed to be entered into the same asylum. Far more women than men were institutionalized in these asylums. The disproportionality of women institutionalized during that era clearly was a reflection of women's lack of rights and their husbands finding the wives' challenging behaviors reason enough to have the spouses involuntarily committed to these institutions. I would like to find statistics that might shed light on the numbers of women who suffered this plight.
