Women, Madness and the Law: A Feminist Reader

This book explores, for the first time in an edited collection, the intersection of three key research areas - women, madness and the law - and advances the debates on how law and the 'psy' sciences play a critical role in regulating and controlling women's lives.

Theoretical approaches to women's madness; Construction of mentally disordered female offenders; The boundaries of femininity: Madness and gender in New Zealand; Charlotte's Web: Historical regulation of 'insane' women murderers in west coast Canada; Women's misery: Continuing pigeonholes into the twenty-first century; Sex bias in psychiatric diagnosis and the courts'; Homelessness, mental disorder, and penal intervention: Women referred to a mental health emergency service; 'Professional accounts of women's violence'; Guilty as charged: An exploration of law's contribution to women's mental illness through abortion narratives'; Defending Battered Women on Charges of Homicide: The Structural and Systemic Versus the Personal and Particular; 'At the centre of the new professional gaze: Women, medicine and confinement'; The treatment of women secure hospital patients and Feminist antipsychiatry praxis: Women and the movement.