Wild Women

From the wandering womb of ancient Greece to the asylums of Victorian England, from Freud's consulting room to the fall of Roe v. Wade, Wild Women traces the long and brutal history of hysteria, a diagnosis invented to explain away women's pain, anger, and desire.Faye Alexandra Rose moves through two and a half thousand years of medicine, myth, and misogyny, pairing meticulously researched historical quotations with poems that give voice to the women behind the diagnosis: the accused witch, the corseted fainting lady, Freud's patient Dora, Breton's muse Nadja. Each poem confronts a different chapter in the story of how women's bodies have been pathologized, controlled, and silenced, and how that story is still being written today.Sharp, formally inventive, and unflinching, Wild Women is both an act of historical reckoning and a rallying cry. It asks what changes when the diagnosis changes but the impulse to control does not, and insists on naming what has too often gone unnamed.