Martha J. Cutter discusses how, in many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works, she addresses this "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women".Cutter, Martha J. "The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourses in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Later Fiction", Literature and Medicine 2001 Fall; 20(2): 151-182. Gilman's works challenge the social construction of women in patriarchal medical discourse who are seen as "silent, powerless, and passive". At the time in which her works take place, between 1840 and 1890, women were exceedingly defined as lesser than—sickly and weak. In this time period, it was thought that women who received formal education (amongst other causes) could develop hysteria, a now-discredited catchall term referring to most mental health diseases identified in women and erroneously believed to stem from a malfunctioning uterus (from the Greek hystera, "womb"). At the time, the medical understanding was that women who spent time in college or studying were over-stimulating their brains and consequently leading themselves into states of hysteria. Many of the diseases recognized in women were seen as a lack of self-control or self-rule. Different physicians argued that a physician must "assume a tone of authority" and that the idea of a "cured" woman is "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician". A hysterical woman craves power. To be treated for her hysteria, she must submit to her physician, whose role is to undermine her desires. Often women were prescribed bed rest as a form of treatment, which was meant to "tame" them and keep them imprisoned. Treatments such as this were a way of ridding women of rebelliousness and forcing them to conform to expected social roles. In her works, Gilman highlights that the harm caused by these types of treatments for women, i.e., "the rest cure", has to do with how her voice is silenced. Paula Treichler explains: "In this story diagnosis 'is powerful and public.... It is a male voice that... imposes controls on the female narrator and dictates how she is to perceive and talk about the world.' Diagnosis covertly functions to empower the male physician's voice and disempower the female patient's."Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature Vol. 3, No. 1/2, Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Spring–Autumn, 1984), pp. 61–77. The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not allowed to participate in her treatment or diagnosis and is completely forced to succumb to everything in which her doctor and in this particular story, her husband, says. The male voice is the one which forces control on the female and decides how she is allowed to perceive and speak about the world around her.
