“‘No Sort of Pleasure at Home’: Responding to Mental Illness in Eighteenth-Century Boston”

A colloq with Sara T. Damiano (Texas State University). Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

By the early 1740s, Simeon Stoddard, the eldest son within a high-status Boston family, exhibited clear signs of adult-onset mental illness. This paper uses Simeon’s story as a window onto elite families’ handling of mental illness during the pre-asylum era. The Stoddards’ paternal and maternal lines disagreed on how to best respond to Simeon’s condition, with women within and beyond his family ultimately shouldering significant legal responsibilities and care work.

Sara Damiano is an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. Her work investigates women and gender in British North America and the Atlantic World, focusing especially on intersections between gendered power and the workings of the economy and legal system. Her first book, To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), received the 2021 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians book prize. Her research has also appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, and the New England Quarterly.  Her current book project, a microhistory of the rise and fall of an elite Boston-based family of land speculators between 1690 and 1785, examines how men and women navigated conflicts between messy realities of family life and normative systems of patrilineal inheritance in early America.

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