As we all well know, women fight a constant battle with themselves...not to faint. Hysterics as they were called, were an expectant problem of women - not because of tightly-laced stays, this malady was the cause of those emotions women are forced to deal with or, rather to contain. An expert at the time explained:The entire female body is riddled by obscure but strangely direct oaths of sympathy...from one extremity of its organic space to the other, it encloses a perpetual possibility of hysteria. The sympathetic sensibilities of her organism...condemns woman to...diseases of the nerves.Why thank you for that elucidation, "doctor."
Yes indeed, it was believed that all those pent-up emotions of amorous affection that women contained had no way of escaping and therefore built up in a lady's womb as some sort of massive heat-bomb ready to explode. And when it did explode? Hysterics.
