People ask me this question a lot, and the answer is, I don't know for sure. I'm not a scholar or a historian; I haven't done nearly enough research to offer a definitive answer. One thing I do know is that women--mothers in particular--have throughout recorded history been extraordinarily limited in having any time to themselves; every word they managed to commit to paper about their interior lives is gold, because it is all, relatively speaking, so very rare. (One of the reason for the explosion of momblogs in recent years, I think, is that, at last, we get to talk! To each other! Across time and space! Do you know how revolutionary that is??) Another fact is that every era and every culture has its own way of classifying and naming illness--so, no, women in the 18th century didn't get "depressed." They called it something else. The question is: what?
When I started researching my book, The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression, I did a lot of hanging out at the Library of Congress, where they have an amazing collection of first-person writing by American women in their American Women's History collection. There are diaries, letters, pamphlets--all written by American women, some of them famous but most of them not famous, detailing the fascinating mundane aspects of their domestic lives. They had no idea they were writing for history, but they were--and some of the things I found sounded to me an awful lot like despair, hopelessness, an oppressive sense of guilt and an aching sense of futility...something we 21st century people just might call depression. Not surprisingly, much of this emotion was couched in religious terms.
From The Diary of Martha Laurens Ramsay, a Charleston, S.C. woman who lived from 1759 to 1811, comes this entry, when she would have been 32 years old.
August 6, 1791:
These three past days have been black days. Lord, deliver me from sin, especially from those which so easily beset and so often oppress me. My soul longs for deliverance and rest.
And, from the 16th of the same month:
Terror and dismay take hold upon me. O, if men knew me as I am known to my God, I should be trampled under foot; the church would disown me; the greatest sinners would abominate me; my husband, that loves and thinks well of me, would wonder at me, and mourn, and I should be hated of all men.
Martha Ramsey was, from all I could tell, a loving wife and mother with no particular reason, in the culture in which she lived, to feel like such a sinner. Perhaps there was some event which she never wrote about which brought about her torment--a secret abortion? an illicit affair? a spiritual crisis? We can speculate. But one of the possibilities (and I speak as a child of the Bible Belt, who grew up convinced that hell was her destiny) is the beast we now call depression.