Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Just another hysterical female…

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Just another hysterical female…:


Just another hysterical female…

Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the 19th century. Women considered to be suffering from it exhibited a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and  “a tendency to cause trouble”. In extreme cases the woman would be forced into the asylum and under go surgical hysterectomy. - from Wikipedia (emphasis mine)

As the Obama Administration’s education policy rolls on into a second term, I didn’t think that Arne Duncan was in any danger of having to find a new job, but that was before reading this bit on Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet blog. Here is the gist:

…opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought