For many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, women have experienced organised and spontaneous events of shared madness.

Before Christianity got rid of everything fun, an Italian community in Puglia had a kind of festival, later named il carnevaletto delle donna (the little carnival of women) by a seventeenth-century physician called Georgio Baglivi. It allowed women to dance and say lewd things and basically act in the ways they weren’t allowed to the rest of the time, as a way to treat their – gestures vaguely – woman stuff. How freeing, for an oppressed woman living in drudgery.

This was the organised version of an existing phenomenon in the region: tarantism. It was believed that spider bites caused women to live a short madness, which could only be cured by dancing. As more and more women joined in, musicians would play different tunes to identify the mood of the spider that had bitten them. For…reasons.

Yes, it’s mad. But it shows how much repressed female rage, lust and vitality needed to be purged after so little self-expression.

There have been many examples of this kind of emotional blood-letting. Often, it’s called mass hysteria – mass psychogenic illness, these days. What generally springs to mind is a bunch of adolescent cheerleaders on their periods, fainting and acting out. Because we still don’t listen to female rage and misery.

Adolescence, pregnancy, post-partum, peri- and full menopause are times of intense hormonal shifts that can make you feel like you’re going insane. And that’s not to mention periods and birth control, or just the daily experience of being alive. But you keep it in, you keep on keeping on. Can’t make a fuss, got to fit in and keep up.

Where does all that pressure go? I guess it’s turned inwards, filling our brains and bodies with a swirling toxic soup of hurts.

Women’s Suffrage was called tarantism by the newspapers: a mass hysteria of silly little women. Their eventual violence, which is now thought to have delayed winning the vote by several years, probably felt like the only way to break through the insufferable, patronising ignorance of the men who would never prioritise their bill in parliament – because it concerned women. And, you know what? The violence was also a natural blood-letting for their rage.

“In a sick society, there is no difference between mass hysteria and wanting your rights, because they’re met with the same degree of credibility.” – Sarah Marshall, You’re Wrong About