Artist's Statement:
"Contact Sheet includes photos of one of the first student-led contact improvisation jams at Carleton College; it is for Physical Education course #150, Contact Improvisation. The author intended to convey the feeling of the dance through photo editing, assembly, and the use of risograph printing techniques."
8 unnumbered pages: color illustrations; approx. 5x7 inches
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most famous work brings the reader into the mind of a woman on the rest cure. With the male figures in her life as her captors, the narrator is forced into a room with nothing to do but think. What's surprising about Gilman's story is the fact that it was so widely celebrated when it was a clear form of resistence against the forms of control over the female body in the late 19th century. Was it simply cognitive dissonance where her audience could believe the story to be entirely fiction, or did her writing stand in to support women who could not share their voices?
This except from a medical book from the mid 19th century explores the idea of insanity as a uniquely feminine problem. Jarvis explores the idea that the female body is prone to insanity much more than their male counterparts. Rhetoric such as this medical book provided grounds for courts and doctors to see women as inherently insane without any evidence, leading to misdiagnoses and forced hospitalizations.
Ruvtz-Rees writes about her experience in the insane asylum in the 19th century. Although she speaks positively about her time in the aslyum, she calls for more home treatments, as she believes "mental disease is infectious." This idea, along with the development of treatments such as the rest cure, begins to make the home a place of imprisonment rather than an outside institution. It is then the family, not the asylum workers and nurses, that imprison the female body.
