Women and the Neurasthenic Tradition: How diagnoses and treatments of mental disorders affect gender norms and what feminism offers as an alternative

This thesis explores the expansion of the Neurasthenic Tradition¹ from the postwar period through the 1970s, focusing on the diagnosis and treatment of nervous disorders attributed to women. In particular I seek to explain how the Neurasthenic Tradition has affected and upheld gender norms.;¹The "Neurasthenic Tradition" is a term used by historians, Andrea Tone, Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Relationship with Tranquillizers (New York: Basic Books, 2009) and David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009) to describe the American embrace of medical solutions for social ills.