The Female Malady 98 was no straiter waistcoat in old-young woman but Dickens women company than the polka-garment of the with the weird gentility." 50 fails »to see the irony in his in the Victorian own It is a charming image, account asylum was precisely the What confined ladies' chain of femi- nine propriety and the straitjacket of a weird but mandatory feminine gentility and the Dickens could not perceive that both the that despite its women And yet, in tendents thought Bedlam before reform it was entering it, that despite offered a some women could patients at women ideology as the scold's bridle had muzzled its one of the most appalling the Victorian asylum than social circumstances might be maddening, and humanitarianism, Victorian psychiatry silenced as effectively through noisy women social services available to more ironies of its women's treatment limitations, tolerant, comfortable, interesting life expect outside Conolly claimed that Hanwell shed more tears and often returned in asylum superin- upon leaving women the asylum than to visit their former on companions and attendants 51 T S Clouston advised medical superintendents not to keep hysterical cases in the asylum too long after convalescence, be- cause "they sometimes get too fond of the place, preferring the dances, amusements, and general liveliness of asylum life to the humdrum and hard work of poor homes." 52 The success of moral management for women may have had than with the dreariness of less to life with the humanity of the asylum beyond the walls