our third speaker one57 who you callin hysterical one57 i am not a crier seriously i didn't even cry at Marley & Me and I'm a dog person so earlier this year when I first saw Nikes dream crazy campaign I got emotional all these female athletes with inspiring stories about taking on the patriarchy in sports now that should been the plot of Marley & Me but at its core as the New York Times On February 26 2019 notes the ads are really about something more women reclaiming the word crazy which is why I was a little surprised when last month track and field star and former Nike athlete Alysia montaño announced her plans to sue Nike because when she got pregnant they stopped paying her the reason as the article explains when you get pregnant you get too emotional too unpredictable and even too crazy yep for literally thousands of years we have been obsessed with what happens inside a woman's uterus and associated that with how she acts and it all started with a term that many of us now take for granted hysteria as the Atlantic on March 24th 2019 notes hysteria was the first and most commonly diagnosed mental health disease and women and was recognized as a mental illness until 1980 however google trends Twitter reddit and even Merriam Webster's dictionary all showed that searches for female hysteria spiked up while the women of the me2 movement spoke out meaning hysterias impacts go far beyond a woman's uterus so today we'll first examine the history of hysteria as a medical diagnosis second look at how the evolution of hysteria on a small scale changed the religious and cultural landscape for women everywhere before finally discussing the large-scale implications to a researchers at Columbia University on April 29th 2019 called the most influential term in the history of marginalizing women for being women one of my favorite things to do is to troll Twitter for idiots here's one of my personal favorites at I am Steve 29 okay the only thing I understand less than the hashtag Game of Thrones hysteria is the number of insane women in the show who just need to shut up and get a man lol but hey if you need a misogynistic photographer in Oklahoma he does weddings this relationship between hysteria and insanity has a long and complex history stretching as far back as our history classes favorite philosopher Aristotle see in ancient Greece aristotle firmly believed that women should not play a role in democracy but he couldn't justify his opinion without something to back him up so he invented a disease the wandering uterus which was basically the belief that when a woman was overly emotional her uterus must have left its usual spot and started wandering around the body making her insane but as Marquette University in November 2018 explains we hardly ever hear about the wandering uterus because the term didn't sound medical enough to be believed so Aristotle coined a new phrase derived from the Greek word meaning uterus hysteria and that stuck so much so that the Greeks and future civilizations in their wake believed that the uterus was responsible for everything that went wrong in a woman's body so their proposed cure forcing women to have sex with men when they didn't want to as Helen King writes in her book Hippocrates women this became the basis for using rape as punishment and more importantly laid the groundwork for normalizing rape and blaming women for being raped in other words as medium argued on April 10th 2018 the term hysteria made what we now know as rape culture possible symptoms of female hysteria often ranged from excessive nervousness to loss of interest in everyday activities both of which we would probably characterize today as depression but a few hundred years ago were signs of being a witch in her book suspicion betrayal and hysteria in 1692 historian Stacy Schiff points out that a medical diagnosis of hysteria that could not be cured through sex oh that was like all of them often meant the patient was told her uterus had been taken over by the devil for many women hysteria in witchcraft were inseparable which Schiff argues marked the beginning of the feminization of madness we still see today but notice something here that people who look like me take for granted the witches are all white because hysteria was exclusively a white woman's disease in her study the race of hysteria women's studies professor Laura Briggs highlights that for women of color common symptoms of hysteria weren't concerning they were considered normal as a result the medical community started using women of color for experiments with brutal procedures on their uterus to try and fix hysteria for white women as the researchers note this treatment became the blueprint for a long history of exploiting people of color in the name of medicine from the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to Henrietta Lacks to the entire history of gynecology leading The New Yorker of August 24th 2018 to suggest that hysteria was the first instance of female bodies being used not just as weapons against ourselves but also against each other but hey it's okay because we got rid of the official diagnosis and fixed everything only a short three hundred years later but not really hysteria set the stage for issues that we still see today women are 40% more likely than men to be diagnosed with a mental illness 60% more likely to be prescribed mood altering drugs and 75% more likely to be diagnosed with emotional instability and yet on average women have to see their doctors four times more than men before receiving a diagnosis meaning we actually have to fight just have our supposed craziness ex Nam alleged at all finally there is perhaps no better time to talk about the importance of hysteria than now as the University of Toronto notes on February 20th 2018 hysteria isn't just important for what it did diagnose but also for what it did it trauma in the wake of hysteria women's stories about actual physical trauma were ignored so when a woman told her doctor she was harassed assaulted or raped she was typically told it was all in her head and as a society we still haven't let that go so much so that attorneys from court cases right here in this very state of Texas have argued that their male defendants who had committed acts of domestic violence against their wives were provoked because those women were on their periods and so they were acting hysterical or as the Duke University Law Journal puts it the next insanity defense the complicated history of hysteria is essential in unpacking not only the female experience but also in understanding the beginnings of a culture whose first response to women isn't are you okay but rather are you sure Sigmund Freud had a fun little pet name for hysteria the suffocating uterus and when he diagnosed hysteria which was often he placed a woman inside a glass room so that fellow doctors and patients could watch her like entertainment these two things together created a term we use even in this active to describe a really funny round of a chai hysterical something so funny you can hardly breathe clearly even today hysterias impacts are no more than a uterus away until we can acknowledge the complicated history of hysteria and all it represents then the message of Nikes dream crazy commercial will be just that a dream you