A woman’s mental health is still being used as a weapon against her

It’s eerily ironic that the architecture of Kew Asylum was designed by someone who probably needed to dip into their self-care supplies and have a friend ask them “hashtag R U OK?” Because the whole thing was designed as an illusion to fool someone looking at the asylum from the outside into thinking it wasn’t menacing; for instance, purposefully planting flowers and hedges and white picket fences only on the visible parts of the outer walls of the property.

As a part of her mission, Catherine had passed herself off as a mentally unwell woman. She was admitted to the Kew Asylum posing as a patient, as planned. Only when she entered her own birdcage and looked out over the wall from the perspective of a trapped inmate did Catherine realise that she was in much more danger than she’d anticipated.

In an irony that would make your menstruation blood run cold, a large number of ex-convicts unable to find other occupations were given employment in Kew as the patients’ “wardens”.

“If it be grim and jail-like outwardly, it is even more gloomy within. The encircling wall, masked outside with luxuriant and carefully tended shrubberies and flower borders, is a harmless-looking thing, provoking an inclination towards elbow-leaning. But internally we find that by reason of the earth having been dug away in a steep slope, the wall is twice as high as it appears.”

Over the next fortnight, Catherine lived as a patient. Inside Kew, she discovered prison-like conditions, with patients being referred to as “inmates”. The women’s area of the asylum was even more cramped than the men’s, due to the laundries and drying courtyards being located there. In an irony that would make your menstruation blood run cold, a large number of ex-convicts unable to find other occupations were given employment in Kew as the patients’ “wardens”.

Even these staff members apparently weren’t able to leave the site during their month-long contracts without strict permission. Nothing like keeping workers locked inside the workplace to really get the 9-5 morale going.

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Catherine discovered that the women’s diagnoses in Kew Asylum were classified under four genres: “Maniacal”, “Melancholia”, “Idiotic” and “Convalescent”. And she reported that many of the women she met weren’t insane at all, but rather suffering from institutionalisation and the poor conditions under which they had to live and survive, including overcrowding, understaffing and a need for women physicians.

Catherine was later accused of being a “government spy” by Kew Asylum’s supervising doctor, who slandered her in all the papers he could muster. Being called a “government spy” or a “policing party pooper” was how you got cancelled back in those days.

The day before Catherine’s ground-breaking article, “The Female Side of Kew Asylum. By an Attendant”, was published, she gave evidence to the final sitting of Victoria’s Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate. Among the Commission’s final recommendations was that a new governing board should supervise appointments and training and appoint “lady physicians” for the female wards, which was utterly earth-shattering for the 1800s when it was generally thought a couple of ex-convicts would be able to do the job, no worries.

Catherine worked tirelessly for the rest of her life bettering the plight of women everywhere. She was one of the founders of the Austral Salon in 1890, a women’s club to foster literature, music and the arts, and she founded the National Council of Women of Victoria in 1902. She bucked so many trends, including that of matrimony.

You probably know personally how easy it is to use mental health as a weapon against women even now, let alone more than 100 years ago.

Her marriage to Thomas Floyd Legge at the Women Writers’ Club in Melbourne in 1918 was the culmination of “a romance of 40 years”. She was 72 years old at the time. Dating someone casually for 40 years before tying the knot is a straight-up miracle and a smooth Sheila choice, even today. Besides, she had already been locked up in one government institution voluntarily and was in no hurry to hop into another.

When it comes to Sheilas, apparently we come into the world judged insane before having to prove we’re rational. This attitude underlines what a mess the mental health system was in Catherine’s time, and how, I’m not pleased to announce, it is still f..ing f..ed.

If you’ve read a newspaper this week, chances are there is a woman in power, a whistleblower or a journalist who has been given unsolicited feedback from a man along the lines of “crazy bitch”, “emotional wreck”, “irrational lady” or “unfit and bonkers”. You probably know personally how easy it is to use mental health as a weapon against women even now, let alone more than 100 years ago.

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Catherine was exceptional for questioning this back then in the only way she knew she’d be believed: by putting herself on the line, and then speaking the truth. We’ve got a pretty solid superpower to embrace in Catherine. She showed us that with all the walls surrounding us, it’s only through tenacity with a large dollop of compassion that we can challenge the status quo and make progress. And her work proudly proves that if you cage a Sheila, she is going to screech.

Edited extract from Sheilas: Badass Women of Australian History (Macmillan) by Eliza Reilly, out now.

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