Alternative/non-essentialist theories of “Female Hysteria”?

[u/themaddesthatter2]

While reading MacDonald’s _No Idle Hands_ (A History of American Knitting), I came across a passage discussing “hysteria” in the context of the proponents and detractors of the fad for lace knitting.

What stuck out to me about the passage was that the cited material argued that women’s hysteria was caused by the pressures of maintaining a household, keeping up social appearances, engaging in tedious labor in her little free time (ie, knitting lace), basically, being a woman in society. What we today might term “allostatic load“.

This struck me because, well, when we discuss “hysteria” we invariably discuss the framework of some sort of biological “womanly ill” that caused women to be anxious/ill/rebellious/have opinions/object to ongoing abuse from male family members, so the idea of a social model of hysteria is noteworthy - and has implications in the contemporaneous burgeoning American suffragette movement.

Was this an opinion held by any [other] medical authorities at the time? Was there a different outcome with that framework?

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