Menstrual Monster or Criminal Lady?: Ella Castle, Biopower, and the Plight of the Female Kleptomaniac in Late 19th Century America.

Authors

• Grace S. Teske, University of North Carolina at CharlotteFollow

About the Author

I am graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte currently pursuing a Master's in History and a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. I also received my Bachelor's in Anthropology and History from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Due to growing up around the healthcare industry and subjected to a constant stream of medical dramas as a child, I am particularly interested in the interaction between medicine, gender and sexuality, and racial capitalism in America.

Document Type

Article

Abstract

On October 5, 1896, Ella Castle, a San Franciscan socialite, was arrested in London for shoplifting. In the proceeding months, Castle's trial became a transatlantic sensation, as her initial veneer as a respectable upper-class woman was replaced by the image of an ill and unstable woman suffering from kleptomania. The case of Ella Castle is representative of the larger social and economic processes that developed in the late 19th century that converged together in the diagnosis of kleptomania. One of the main transformations was the development of consumer capitalism which manifested into the new urban institution of the department store. Within the department store, female identity was renegotiated around the consumption of material goods rather than their production. As such, women became active consumers who moved freely and assertively in the public sphere, an image that contradicted traditional domestic ideals of femininity. Most worryingly, women began to display criminal behavior in the form of shoplifting— a new pathology that represented the deteriorating moral and physical state of white, bourgeois women. Concomitant with women’s supposed deterioration and the development of consumer capitalism was the increased medicalization of the female body and sexuality which converged in the diagnosis of kleptomania. This paper deploys Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower to analyze the medical discourses about kleptomania as a medium to extrapolate middle-class values in a period of societal flux. Through these discourses, kleptomania can be identified as a sociomedical site where social values were contested, redrawn, and reinvested back into the female body. Kleptomania served as a diagnostic tool for male physicians to reinscribe a class sexuality intended to redraw deviant women back into the boundaries of acceptable gender manifestations, giving physicians a unique vantage point to inject their own supervision into the biological processes and identity of middle- and upper-class women.

Recommended Citation

Teske, Grace S. (2026) "Menstrual Monster or Criminal Lady?: Ella Castle, Biopower, and the Plight of the Female Kleptomaniac in Late 19th Century America.," Madison Historical Review: Vol. 23, Article 8.
Available at: https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/mhr/vol23/iss1/8