Hysterical

Pragya Agarwal Canongate £16.99 ★★★★★

The word ‘hysterical’ – the title of Pragya Agarwal’s book – is one that, as she observes, carries a ‘great deal of cultural baggage’. In its original, Ancient Greek coinage it could not apply to men since it signified a specific agitation linked to the notion of a ‘wandering uterus’, which was thought to travel around a woman’s body provoking emotional disruption. Even today, with its uterine origins forgotten, the term is still mainly used for women, often judged ‘hysterical’, a state seen as irrational, excessive and temporary.

How societies define emotions proves fertile territory for the author, a behavioural scientist. So does the long-running argument on whether emotional differences between men and women are hard-wired or acquired.

Agarwal rejects ‘the essentialist view’ that there is an ‘innate’ difference in ‘emotional experience and expression’ between the sexes. Instead, the idea that women are more nurturing, patient and kind is ‘sown deep into their bones’ by society. Much of the research on social conditioning is compelling. Take smiling, for example: studies show that boys and girls smile roughly similar amounts until their early teenage years, when girls start to do so much more than boys.

With adolescence, women are expected to demonstrate greater ‘positive emotion’: more than 98 per cent of adult women report being told to smile at some point. Social media intensifies rewards for conforming: young women get more ‘likes’ on their Instagram selfies when they replicate ‘normative feminine signals’ such as ‘pouting faces’ or the ‘looking-down giggle’. There are salutary reminders, too, of crackpot ideas about female biology: in 1873, Harvard president Edward Clarke argued against women’s education because it would draw too much blood towards the brain and so endanger the reproductive organs. At times, though, the author’s opinions overpower the evidence. We’re told that ‘regardless of biological sex, our bodies are largely shaped by culture, both in the ways we perceive ourselves and how others see us’. Our bodies are surely primarily shaped by sex and genetics. There is much to fascinate in this book, but I would have trusted its arguments more if only it had tried to convince me of them a little less.