A grateful ode to the men who’ve always known best
Today began like any other. A man explained to me what I meant. Another explained how I
felt. A third, bless him, explained trauma to me. Mine, specifically. As I nodded along in
grateful silence, as is tradition, it hit me.
We don’t appreciate them enough.
These tireless translators of our emotions, these interpretive dance partners to our wombs and
wild thoughts, have been decoding the female condition for centuries. It must be exhausting
for them, carrying the burden of explaining women to both ourselves, and to each other.
So today I offer this small tribute. A love letter, if you will. An annotated history of just how
lucky we’ve been to have men guiding our mental health journey from the dawn of time to
the dystopian present.
The great irrigation crisis (AKA Sex as treatment)
Let’s start with Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, and coincidentally, the
founding father of uterus-related panic. Around 400 BC, he diagnosed women’s emotional
distress as “hysteria” from the Greek word hystera, meaning womb. He believed our wombs
could become restless, wander freely about the body, and if not properly irrigated through
regular sex, release toxic fumes that clouded our minds. Symptoms included anxiety, fainting,
tremors, and of course, the audacity to speak.
But Hippocrates had more to say. He asserted that a woman’s body was physiologically cold
and wet, unlike the warm and dry male body, and therefore more prone to the putrefaction of
tumours. This made the uterus especially vulnerable to illness, particularly when deprived of
sex and procreation, which he believed widened a woman’s canals and promoted the
cleansing of the body. In virgins, widows, single or sterile women, the uterus, unsatisfied and
neglected, was said to emit toxic fumes and even wander around the body, causing symptoms
such as suffocation, anxiety, convulsions, tremors and paralysis. Apparently, nothing unsettles
a uterus more than celibacy and a closed front door.
His solution was simple and civic-minded: encourage all women, including widows and
unmarried ones, to get married and maintain a satisfactory sexual life within the bounds of
marriage. All of this was laid out with clinical confidence and timeless misogyny. His
prescription? More sex. Preferably heterosexual and frequent. In short, the cure for madness
was a man. For centuries this theory stuck. In the Victorian era, physicians would manually
“relieve” women of hysteria via pelvic massage until someone invented the vibrator to ease
the burden. How thoughtful.
The Romans respond – Don’t water the womb, starve it
The Romans were not ones to miss a chance to medicalise morality. They adopted hysteria as
a convenient explanation for women’s moods, independence and general aliveness. While
Greek physicians recommended sexual intercourse to subdue the womb, Roman doctors took a different route.
They advocated virginity, cold baths and avoidance of pleasure.
If that failed, they turned to spiritual remedies like prayer and the occasional exorcism.
Because nothing says “sound medical practice” like telling a woman to pray the sass away.
Among them was Soranus of Ephesus, a second-century physician whose four-volume
treatise Gynaecology became a cornerstone of female healthcare. He rejected the wandering
womb theory, which earned him some credit, but instead blamed emotional disorders on
menstrual irregularities, prolonged chastity and the trauma of childbirth. His remedies
included bloodletting, induced vomiting and the application of cold compresses to the
genitals. Progressive, but still firmly rooted in the belief that women needed managing rather
than understanding.
Somewhere, a first-century Karen was probably demanding to speak to his supervisor.
Hysteria goes viral – Enter the 17th Century WitchTok
By the 1600s, the uterus had been framed and now the entire woman was under suspicion.
Enter the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Nineteen women and several men were executed, and
over two hundred accused. All of this was sparked by a group of women exhibiting fits,
hallucinations and odd behaviour. These symptoms, now recognised as possible trauma
responses or neurological conditions, were seen as clear signs of demonic possession.
Local physician William Griggs diagnosed the girls with spiritual affliction using tools that
included beetle’s blood and dried dolphin heart. Once again, women’s pain and confusion
were interpreted through folklore and fear.
Their diagnosis? Diabolical in origin.
Their treatment? Hanging or torture.
We truly owe our lives to the foresight of men who saw our trauma and said “Let’s call the priest.”.
The symptoms these women displayed (convulsions, screaming and hallucinations) mirror
what we now know as trauma responses or neurological disorders. But in an age when
women couldn’t own property, let alone diagnose themselves, the safest thing they could do
was stay quiet. You know, to avoid being hanged for having an opinion or epilepsy.
The ripple effect? Mass hysteria. Neighbours accusing neighbours. Women dragged from
their homes because they were either too loud, too independent, childless, too poor, or just…
different. One particularly offensive charge? Owning too many books. Another? Having a
mole or freckle in the wrong spot. And while many of these women were hanged, one man,
Giles Corey, was famously pressed to death with stones. His last words were “More weight”,
something every woman diagnosed with hysteria has muttered spiritually at some point.
Even more absurd was the infamous “Swimming Test” where accused witches were bound
and tossed into water to see if they floated. Floating meant guilt. Sinking meant innocence,
though often followed by death. Justice, apparently, by buoyancy.
As a freckly swimmer who spends more time in pools than on land,
I’m fairly certain I’d have floated straight into a guilty verdict (probably while quoting Virginia Woolf and adjusting my goggles).
World Wars and the gendering of trauma
Fast forward to modern warfare, where male trauma finally earned a label. “Shell Shock”,
“Battle Fatigue” and eventually “Post-Vietnam Syndrome” became accepted terms to
describe the psychological fallout of combat.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formally included Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-III.
This was a watershed moment, but it also reinforced whose trauma mattered most.
War trauma. Male trauma. Trauma with medals.
This is not to discount, judge, or target male veterans. Their suffering was real and overdue for recognition.
But the definition of PTSD was built around a model of trauma that centred on combat,
masculinity and military service. That framing created a ripple effect, narrowing how trauma
was understood, diagnosed and treated for decades to come.
The quiet casualties – How women’s trauma got lost in translation
This ripple effect reached far beyond barracks and battlefields. It meant that the trauma of a
woman raped by someone she trusted, or a girl raised in a home of relentless instability, or a
mother shattered by birth trauma, was not seen through the same clinical lens.
Their suffering was personal, not professional. Private, not patriotic.
As such, it was easier to mislabel, dismiss or just simply ignore.
The medical gaze, once calibrated to war zones, seemed to look straight through them.
The ripple continued through Emergency Departments, where panic attacks became
“Overreactions” and where complex trauma became “Attention-seeking.” It shaped
generations of clinicians trained to recognise flashbacks from firefights but not from family
dinners.
It seeped into public health policies, where male veterans were prioritised for PTSD treatment while women were told to try yoga, journaling or just to calm down.
It reinforced the myth that real trauma came with a uniform and a gun, not a bedroom door or a labour
ward.
And it ensured that when women finally spoke up, they were met not with validation, but with suspicion and sedation.
This clinical blind spot did more than miss female trauma; it rewrote how women were
allowed to express it. Emotional pain became a performance to be judged. If it was quiet, it
was invisible. If it was loud, it was excessive. The more a woman deviated from the accepted
script of fragility and compliance, the less seriously she was taken. Over time, this didn’t just
influence how trauma was treated, but how femininity itself became a diagnostic risk factor.
“Too Emotional” – Diagnosing distress or just dismissing it?
Women are not just socialised to soothe others. They are culturally expected to do so quietly,
politely, and without disrupting the status quo. Hegemonic femininity in Western contexts
presents the ideal woman as nurturing, emotionally restrained, and deferential (bonus points
if she cries attractively and apologises for the inconvenience). When women express distress
outside these narrow bounds, through anger, assertiveness or refusal to be passive, they are
quickly labelled as dramatic, attention-seeking or difficult. They are “Too much”.
These labels do more than insult. They influence how symptoms are interpreted, how
diagnoses are made, and whether pain is taken seriously. In the context of PTSD, where
diagnostic frameworks have been shaped by male, combat-focused experiences, women’s
trauma is often overlooked or misclassified as emotional instability instead of legitimate
psychological injury.
This has created a diagnostic trap. Women are more likely to receive labels such as borderline
or histrionic personality disorder, conditions that often centre on how emotions are expressed
rather than understood.
These diagnoses rely on assumptions about excessive femininity and are often rooted more in cultural discomfort than clinical accuracy.
Within healthcare systems where gender bias persists, this pathologizing of female distress acts as a silencing mechanism.
When women seek help, they are frequently told they are too emotional, too
sensitive or simply not coping well enough. Their trauma is often treated as a personal flaw
instead of a credible clinical issue. In a system built on masculine definitions of strength and
suffering, women’s pain remains underdiagnosed, under-researched and underestimated.
Meanwhile, women served too
Women in uniform, in militaries around the world, have long faced environments not built for
their protection. Military sexual trauma, vicarious trauma and moral injury are often excluded
from formal definitions of operational stress.
A medic witnessing unspeakable suffering.
A peacekeeper betrayed by her leadership.
An intelligence analyst absorbing death by proxy.
A Gender Advisor reporting on atrocities committed against women and children.
These do not fit the battlefield archetype.
Trauma has long been defined by proximity to explosions and gunfire. Women’s trauma,
rooted in proximity to betrayal, degradation or moral compromise, is still seen as secondary.
Support systems lag behind. Research excludes them. Diagnoses are missed or mislabelled.
The trauma exists, but the infrastructure does not.
From “Hysteria” to “Conversion disorder”…. New name, same silencing
As hysteria faded from medical language, it re-emerged with new labels such as
“Somatisation”, “Functional neurological disorder” or “Conversion disorder”. Each one a tidy
way to say “We can’t find anything wrong, so it must be in your head.”. The packaging
changed, but the sentiment stayed the same. If it didn’t show up on a scan or under a
microscope it must be the woman’s fault.
These modern terms allowed medicine to maintain a veneer of scientific neutrality while
continuing to dismiss complex emotional and psychological pain, particularly in women.
They gave clinicians a diagnosis that sounded clinical, without requiring the discomfort of
actually listening. Conveniently, these disorders often implied that the patient had converted
emotional distress into physical symptoms because she couldn’t express it the “right” way. In
other words, she wasn’t just unwell. She was doing it wrong. And it wasn’t the first time
women’s trauma had been rewritten to protect male comfort.
From listening to gaslighting – Freud’s quick pivot
Freud initially identified childhood sexual trauma as a common thread among his female
patients, many of whom reported experiences of abuse by male relatives or authority figures.
In 1896 he proposed the “Seduction Theory”, suggesting that these early experiences of
sexual violation were the root cause of their hysteria. For a brief shining moment Freud
listened to women. But the backlash was swift.
The idea that respectable fathers and upstanding men could be molesting their daughters was considered too outrageous, too destabilising for polite society.
Rather than confront this ugly truth, Freud backpedalled. He recast the reports not as memories, but as fantasies.
According to his revised thinking, the women weren’t traumatised victims, but neurotics indulging in subconscious wish fulfilment.
This pivot gave birth to some of Freud’s most enduring theories, including the infamous
concept of “Penis Envy.” He argued that little girls, upon realising they do not possess a
penis, develop feelings of inferiority and jealousy toward boys, which in turn shapes their
neuroses and lifelong identity crises. So now, not only were women’s traumas imagined, they
were apparently driven by anatomical envy. Abuse was sidelined in favour of metaphor. And
once again, female suffering became a symbol of internal deficiency, not external harm.
Because of course, what else could explain a woman’s pain besides wanting a penis?
Certainly not, say, being abused or ignored.
These renamed diagnoses echo loudly in modern clinics. A woman walks into an Emergency
Department with chest pain and shortness of breath and leaves with a pamphlet on anxiety.
Another describes numbness, fatigue or dissociation and is told to monitor her stress levels.
The language is more polished now, the dismissal more polite. But the effect is the same. Her
story is filtered through suspicion. Her pain is reinterpreted as performance. And her file fills
up with terms like “Psychogenic”, “Somatic” or “Non-organic” rather than what it really is:
trauma, misrecognised.
A 2022 study published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry found that
women are significantly more likely than men to receive psychiatric diagnoses like functional
neurological disorder when presenting with unexplained symptoms, even when underlying
trauma is present. The issue is not invisibility. It is mislabelling.
Hysteria never left. It just got a makeover. And a diagnostic code.
The Handmaid’s present – modern diagnoses, medieval attitudes
In the military, trauma screening exists. But female veterans are still underdiagnosed,
excluded from clinical trials and dismissed more often than their male peers. When they
report symptoms they are told they are anxious, dramatic or hormonal. Meanwhile, their male
colleagues receive expedited diagnoses and validation.
This trend is not isolated to the military. In Australia, a 2023 report found that two out of
three women experience discrimination in healthcare. In the United States, research shows
that women’s pain is systematically underestimated, their symptoms attributed to stress or
exaggeration. We are still too emotional to be reliable narrators of our own suffering.
Why I’m writing this now
This is not just a history or herstory lesson. These patterns are not dead. They breathe through
every delayed diagnosis, every dismissed pain, every story told and not believed. The ghosts
of hysteria whisper through medical textbooks, trauma screenings and under-resourced
clinics.
At the time of writing this article I am eagerly awaiting the results of my PhD which explores
the need to apply a gender lens to how we understand and support the mental health of female
veterans. It was written in moments of clarity, and in moments when I could barely hold a
pen. I live with PTSD. I am a sexual assault survivor, an Army officer, a former peacekeeper,
and just to be clear, someone who has never once suffered from penis envy.
Satire is a scalpel. It cuts into assumptions and lays bare the absurdity of systems we still
trust. But this article is not about laughing at the past. It is about exposing how close we
remain to it.
I will also say that at times like this humour helps. However, this article is not
just about me. I write this for the women who were told they were too loud, too emotional,
too sensitive, too much. They were never too much. It was the others who weren’t enough.
And little by little, we can make a change to this.
Sisters doing it for themselves
Recently, a group of brave women veterans stepped forward on 60 Minutes and Channel 7,
breaking years of enforced silence to share their lived experiences of military sexual trauma.
Their stories are not outliers; they are warnings. These women are not just survivors, but
advocates, pushing for a system that no longer gaslights pain as weakness or labels trauma as
failure. They speak not for attention, but for accountability.
In the vacuum left by a system slow to reform, women in the ADF have turned to each other.
Grassroots organisations like Women Veterans Australia are doing the work that should never
have been left to volunteers. They are creating safe spaces, offering trauma-informed support
and showing what true care and solidarity look like. These aren’t fringe movements. They are
lifelines. And they are a reminder that sometimes, when institutions fail, sisterhood becomes
survival.
To the woman reading this, the one who has struggled, who’s been dismissed, misdiagnosed or made to feel like her pain was too loud – I see you.
Your feelings are valid. Your story matters.You are not, and never were, alone.
So here’s to the centuries of support prior to now. To the wandering wombs, the witch-hunts
and the Diagnostic Manuals that couldn’t quite fit us in. To the Freud footnotes, the
battlefield breakthroughs and the male-led mental health movements that found time for
everyone else first. A sincere thank you to the men of the past for carrying the burden of
knowing what is wrong with us, even when our sisters who have come before us did not.
Small talk never changed the World
If anyone wants to challenge or discuss this article, I welcome it. I know people are not going
to like everything in this article and that is okay. I would rather it is spoken about, even if
your words are not glowing, because progress does not happen in silence. It happens when
we sit at the same table, listen with intent and accept that lived experiences carry weight. We
have done the “More weight” thing before and, spoiler alert; it did not end well for the
witches.
We have no control over changing what has already happened. But we definitely can do our
best at shaping what happens next. We must never stop fighting for change, regardless of how
uncomfortable it may make others feel. Real change comes from removing gender bias,
having honest conversations and advocating for equity. Imagine if the witches had unionised.
Imagine if Freud had a focus group that wasn’t just Freud. Herstory would look a whole lot
different.
Sisterhood sign off
The time is now to show up for our sisters, daughters, partners, wives, colleagues and yes, for
each other. Silence is not neutrality, its complicity. We cannot just sit quietly, adjusting our
wandering wombs and hoping someone else will fix it. That is a solo swim which none of us
are going to survive. The future is built by those who are brave enough to speak, to listen and
to act. And if they think you’re too loud, too opinionated, too much….good! Be too much.
Because if they think you’re too much alone, wait until they see you and your sisters together.
That’s not too much. That’s exactly enough to break what needs breaking.
So here’s the deal. Laugh at the humour if you want, but do not ignore the facts behind it.
Talk about this article, talk about herstory, talk about your own experiences. Moreover, when
others talk to you, listen. It does not matter whether we are male, female or any other
identity, we all have to fight for this change together, regardless of how hard or scary it may
be in the process.
Remember – the women before us survived corsets, witch trials and Freud’s
greatest hits. You’ve got this!
About the author:
Liz Daly is a Health Officer in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps. She is eagerly
awaiting the results of her PhD which explores gender-responsive mental healthcare for
female veterans.
A proud female veteran, she balances her professional life with a love of
swimming – and will now be applying extra sunscreen to protect her freckles.
She still proudly fights like a girl.