Suicide, gender, and the fear of modernity in nineteenth-century medical and social thought

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1993 by Howard I. Kushner

In the early nineteenth century numerous European and North American commentators warned that the growth of cities would be accompanied by an assortment of social ills, all of which could be traced to the destruction of traditional social relations. While this belief had more ancient origins, the fear of the modern took on a special intensity in the nineteenth century. The assertion in 1820 by Etienne Esquirol, the leader of the French asylum movement, that "madness is the disease of civilization" was emblematic of these views. (1) The rise of factories, which led to the downgrading of traditional skills and the substitution of wage labor for familial production, was portrayed as particularly disruptive. Adherence to familial roles was depicted as the primary defense against the forces of social disintegration. Because middle-class ideology, as opposed to social reality, emphasized the role of women as mothers and as guardians of the family, theorists assumed that women were better positioned than men to resist the chaos ascribed to modernity.

This analysis was sustained by the new science of social statistics, whose initial findings seemed to provide empirical evidence attesting to the negative impact of urban life. Compilations of rates of disease, insanity, and violence reinforced ancient suspicions about the evils of the city. (2) Because self-destructive behavior became a prima facie example of the corrupting effects of urbanization, the incidence of suicide developed into a barometer for social health. (3) Given the assumptions which had informed the collection of these data, it was almost inevitable that what constituted a suicide would be defined in ways that reinforced assertions about the disruptive consequences of urbanization and modernization. What commentators considered to be self-destructive behavior was framed by their assumptions of what (modernity) caused self-destructive behavior and who (men) would be most susceptible to it. (4) These beliefs were enshrined in Emile Durkheim's 1897 definitive, Suicide: A Study in Sociology and have remained undisputed ever since. (5)

From the very first, hypotheses about the causes of suicide were tied to sentimental visions of the family and to an ambivalence toward social change. Thus, warnings of nascent suicide epidemics were coupled with nostalgic portraits of rural life. Since the nineteenth century, experts have concluded that the best safeguards against suicide lay in the restoration of traditional values, especially the patriarchal family. (6)

Given the logic of these assumptions it was a foregone conclusion that women would prove more immune to suicide than men. A gendered analysis, however, not only challenges that premise, but also it calls into question the entire statistical enterprise which has informed our understanding of suicide since the early nineteenth century. (7)

The City as Killer

The connection between suicide and urban life has deep roots in Western thought. As early as the seventeenth century, clergymen and moral philosophers portrayed urban dwellers at a much greater risk of suicide than their country cousins. For instance in 1653, the English Puritan minister Sir William Denny connected what he alleged was an outbreak of suicides to the growth of London as an urban center. (8) By the eighteenth century the city became a metaphor for those habits--intemperance, idleness, melancholy, decline of religious faith, and licentiousness--which sermons since the seventeenth century had connected with suicide. "Why," asked Voltaire in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), "do we have fewer suicides in the country than in cities?" The reason, according to Voltaire, was that "in the fields it is only the body which suffers; in the city it is the mind. The ploughman doesn't have time to be melancholic. It is," he concluded, "the idle who kill themselves." (9) Like Voltaire, Jean Dumas (1773) tied the alleged increase in suicide to the decline of the traditional social and moral order brought on by the growth of cities. (10) A decade later the French playwright Louis Sebastien Mercier claimed that urban conditions had made "suicide ... more common in Paris today than in all the other cities in the known world." (11)

The association of suicide, vice, urbanization, and modernity gained intensity in the beginning of the nineteenth century as the generalized anxieties of earlier eras were translated into social "facts" by swelling urban populations and by the growth of urban classes less attached to traditional authoritarian structures. Informing and exacerbating all of this was a fear of gender chaos: women, it seemed, were becoming more like men and men, more like women. Although these concerns surfaced in revolutionary France, they intensified throughout the nineteenth century. (12) Thus, as experts defined suicide as a male activity, they simultaneously labelled women who killed themselves as entering the male sphere. Within the rules that defined who was at risk for self-destruction lay the warning that if women persisted in acting like men they endangered not only themselves, but also the foundation of all that mattered, the family. Often, as l show below, this connection was explicit. Often, however, these gendered issues were submerged in a formulaic and generalized set of caveats about the dangers of urban life which portrayed those most subsumed in it (men) at greatest risk of suicide. In this construction, women (because suicide was gendered as male) rarely appear. This absence, however, both obscures and reveals concrete fears that increasing numbers of working urban women were themselves among the forces of modernity that posed a "threat" to the moral fabric. (13) So, while anxiety about the changing role of women was no mere abstraction, any more than the fear of class conflict was, it remained subterranean in the highly structured and ritualized jeremiads about the connections between suicide and urban life. It is those latter texts and warnings that I examine first, before I reconnect them with the more explicit discussion of women, gender, and suicide.