The Not-So-Golden Years: Lobotomizing the Post-War Woman

While looking through one of the Photoplasty contests on Cracked.com, 29 Insane Pastimes That Prove History Was Terrifying, I happened upon an especially disturbing entry about the use of the lobotomy procedure to essentially create the perfect – or at least, the more obedient – housewife or child.  Aghast at the idea that this happened as recently as the early1950s, I did some research on the history of the lobotomy procedure as well as its use on women.

Source: annetaintor.com

The History of the Lobotomy

The procedure itself was relatively unprecise.  Psychiatrist Walter Freeman , the man that popularized and performed the procedure for all ailments from headaches to Schizophrenia, said that the procedure consisted of sticking an icepick in the patient’s eye and ‘wiggling it’ around, blindly cutting parts of the frontal lobe in order to make an otherwise unrulypatient more docile.

Furthermore, the procedure itself in no way required the consent of the patient.

Only the consent of a close relative such as a spouse, and the doctor that would be performing the surgery, work actually needed.  This is especially terrifying to me considering Freeman had a no-anesthesia policy, and instead opted to use electroshock therapy to knock the patient unconscious before operating.

Between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, around 18,000 patients had lobotomies performed on them.  Many of them were patients who were admitted to mental asylums, and the lobotomies had been carried out less for their sake than for the peace of mind of the institution workers themselves.

Subjecting patients to such a horrendous surgery for thesake of those around them set a terrifying precedent that carried into households around the U.S.  Children, women, and the mentally retarded were often targeted by their own family members to undergo the surgery, which was professed to cure all mental and behavioral disorders, including those which were not disorders at all.

One man - Howard Dully -  who was later interviewed by the National Public Radio (NPR) had been the youngest patient to be lobotomized at the age of twelve, for no other reason than because his stepmother had forced it upon him.  She took him to doctor after doctor – convinced that the slightly absent-minded boy was "savage" – only to be told repeatedly that he was perfectly normal.

That didn’t stop her from forcing him to be lobotomized, nor did it stop Freeman from performing the operation.

The fact that Dr. Freeman performed this incredibly intrusive, extremely dangerous surgery (his particular method was immediately banned after one of his patients had a brain hemorrhage and died) with little to no regard for his patients’ psychiatric record or glaring lack thereof points to one terrifying conclusion with regards to the high proportion of women who were lobotomized around this time.

Changing Gender Roles

In addition to the 1940s and 1950s being a time of great popularity for the Freeman’s lobotomy surgery, it was also a time of great social change: WWII had finally ended, the role of women had changed significantly, and more importantly, a couple decades earlier they white women were given the right to vote.  As men came back in droves from the war, they found that many jobs once occupied by men alone had been taken up by women.  More importantly however, many women were content to remain working, and fought to retain their positions while men expected them to relinquish them to returning soldiers.  This phenomenon was encapsulated best in the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, where one of the characters is left by his wife – a woman working at a nightclub and living on her own – and who later finds love with a ‘better’ woman, one concerned with being a caretaker, and taking a supportive role for the man in her life.

Given this backlash to the new role of women in American society, it is worrisome that during this time many of those lobotomized – to make them more docile, and manageable for their family or for their caretakers (like a pet or an infant) – were women.

Coincidence or...?

Was the use of lobotomies part of some unconscious, frantic social desire to correct women's behavior, which at the time was so subversive to traditional values?  It is difficult to give a concrete answer to such a controversial question, especially given that around the same time period, mental asylums were critically overcrowded and the medical community was desperate for a solution.  

However, given that as a sort of institutionalized counter-protest, many governmental policies taxed more of women's income than a man's (legitimizing this action by stating that a woman's income is likely a secondary family income anyways), and given the medical community's track record for performing procedures against a female patient's will in order to further some political or societal goal - even today - make the use of lobotomies for the same purpose seem not so far-fetched after all.