Lisa Gålmark on Anna Odell’s predecessors:

How they exposed the misogynistic mental health care

The unknown woman’s Western history is long, and wide.

Enrolment in the category of woman unites half of the population. Unknown is the status that society’s less privileged experience – particularly those without documents, finances, networks. For those with some control, there are opportunities to conduct solidarity investigations; assume the role of unknown in order to uncover and, through magnification or caricature, reflect the social order.

In Anna Odell’s exhibition Unknown, Woman 2009-349701 at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, in film set design by Marianne Lindberg de Geer, a young unknown woman is framed by the absurd domination techniques of the institutional monopoly of truth and coercion. Come along here – otherwise you have resisted. Let yourself be strapped in now – otherwise you are aggressive. If you don’t pretend to be sick, you’re sick, if you pretend to be sick, you’re really sick.

There are forerunners to highlight in this Western undercover history. Other ”unknown” women have testified remarkably close to Odell about being transformed through power-influenced gazes and encounters. Nellie Bly (1864–1929) as an unknown Cuban woman incarcerated in a mental hospital in New York:

”From the moment I arrived at the medical facility on the island, I made no attempt to maintain the assumed role of being insane. I spoke and behaved just like I usually do in everyday life. Yet, and strangely enough, the more mentally sound I talked and behaved, the more disturbed I was supposed to be by all but one physician whose kindness and gentle manner I will not soon forget.”

The story of reporter Nellie Bly’s undercover is currently premiering in the US as the feature film Ten days in a madhouse, directed by Timothy Hines. Bly checks into a nearby women’s shelter, complains of a headache, states that she cannot work and that she is from Cuba. Within a day, she is on the boat over to the mental hospital on the island of Blackwell.

In a series of articles published in 1887, entitled “Ten days in a mad-house”, called one of the most noble feats in the history of investigative journalism, Bly reveals that the lion’s share of the inmates is not actually insane. Either they are immigrants who do not speak English and therefore cannot make themselves understood by the hospital staff, or they are single without any means, contacts or other opportunities in society. According to Bly, the inmates suffer from mental disorders, but many are simply destitute and exhausted women who have sought help. She experiences how the doctors wrongly assess her as crazy:

”After this I began to have less regard for the ability of physicians than I ever had before, and a greater regard for my own person. Now I was convinced that no doctor could determine whether a person was insane or not as long as the case was not violent.”

After ten days, Bly is rescued by the New York World newspaper from the fate as a lifetime inmate. There is no objection from the hospital management, instead a doctor thanks her with appropriate reflection: ”I am happy now that you did this and if I had known your purpose I would have assisted you.” The series of articles leads to a grand jury inspection in which Bly testifies about how the unknown women are subjected to a sloping plane of dismissal and lack of respect: ice-cold baths, treatments, such as forced starvation, forced injections, physical punishments, threats of sexual assault and attitudes towards the patients as ”if they were soulless robots”.

The jury trusts the testimony and accepts all suggestions for improvements. Nellie Bly’s undercover as an unknown woman has long-term results: the city of New York increases the budget for psychiatric care by one million dollars annually.

”These women are really unknown – no one knows about them or cares what happens to them except their own friends. They are sentenced to prison time and time again.” In 1910, after suffragettes were refused bail and sentenced to longer prison sentences than her for the same acts, the suffragette Constance Lytton (1869–1923) gets the idea of making an unknown woman.

In upper-class society of the time, Lytton’s position would probably have been the very opposite of such a person, but as a member of the category of women, Lytton has no means of her own, no education, no work and with a male heir in the family, she cannot inherit as a woman. That which she does own is called respected status.

A superiority Lytton decides to abandon in order to investigate how female political underclass prisoners are treated. Lytton makes her undercover ”ugly” to test also how this affects the treatment. The model she employs is the prejudiced and heckling image of women’s rights activists in the British press.

Lytton’s alter ego enters forbidden public spaces, throws slogan-wrapped stones into the garden of the London governor, repeatedly gets thrown against the cobblestones by the police, participates in the suffragettes’ hunger strike in Liverpool prison and is force-fed eight times.

Constance Lytton depicts the physical and mental anxiety; to be restrained, silenced, declared unaccountable, even insane. With the help of her siblings and on medical grounds, she is released from prison, but her health is never restored. Almost ten years later, Constance Lytton dies of cardiac arrest.

A film about the suffragettes in England has been made, Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, with a Swedish premiere in mid-January next year. Since 2010, Lytton’s well-written book Prisons and prisoners is available in a new edition from Cambridge University Press.

Anyone enrolled in the lower class and then admitted for care has a special right to rebel. Anna Odell’s exhibition Unknown, Woman 2009-349701 symbolizes women’s historical protest against being defined and diagnosed when it is rather paper, income, contacts, equality that are missing. To be limited and restrained, commanded obedience and stillness as citizens and human beings.

At the same time, the artwork is a submission against the coercion and restraint of the half a million women aged 16–24 who have been treated in Swedish hospitals for suicide attempts or serious self-harm, according to the National Board of Health and Welfare in 2011. One in three belts in psychiatry is a woman aged 18–34, often in cases of suspicion of sexual abuse and despite the fact that psychotherapeutic trauma treatment would more appropriate, see Sörmlands Nyheter (20 Jan 2015), ”Restraint is devastating for victims of sexual assault”.

Thus, the relevant and concrete question unfolds: When will contemporary psychiatric treatment and research begin to apply feminist power analyses?

Odell’s Unknown, Woman 2009-349701 does not express any purpose about influencing. Still, the work makes formidable existential and political resistance; and thus, contributes to a more transparent and safer psychiatric care. Unknown, woman, as artistic testimony, attest to state financial savings and norms with deep roots. To change – and make known.

Previously published 20 November 2015 in Aftonbladet Kultur

Translated from the Swedish

22/10 2025

© Arimneste Anima Museum # 32