One point that I found interesting in Elaine Showalter’s article “Managing Women’s Minds” was the impact of the patients’ image in the determination of their insanity. Showalter described how if a female patient was able to dress and groom herself according to Victorian standards then she showed progress. It amazed me that such a superficial thing could qualify as an indication of any progress. I realize that the doctors considered this an improvement because the women met society’s expectations for a woman, which only exemplified yet again how social constructs influence the way science is practiced. Instead of creating new methods to treat mental illness or observe mental progress, the treatments and measurements relied on how well the woman moved back to the norm of a Victorian woman. We saw the same societal influence in the development of the radical new therapy of doing laundry. We can see how the doctors reasoned that the therapy would work by reminding women of how they should be in society through domestic chores.

We saw this same focus of women’s physical appearances in Londa Schiebinger’s article “Theories of Gender and Race”. Schiebinger described that even though anthropologists collected data on the intelligence of men of different races through the ridiculous measurements of their skulls, they did not consider using the same technique to measure the intelligence of women. Instead they focused their research on the appearance of women from different races and recorded physical traits such as the “redness of lips, length and style of hair, and the size and shape of breasts or clitorises” and most importantly the pelvis. By how much the appearance of the woman deviated from the norm determined her inferiority or superiority.

In both cases there was little attention paid to the mental capacity of women. In the mental institutions there was never a mention of mental tests for improvement, only the doctors’ concern for whether the woman appeared normal by either dressing in the correct fashion or by performing the proper domestic duties of a woman. In the case of the anthropologists, there is not even a curiosity to see how the intelligence of a woman compares across races, even though the experiments to do so were faulty with prejudices.

Thus the social construct of normal appearance for a woman is one factor that has hindered the objective study of women’s minds in science because they set a predetermined norm.