First, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell designed the “rest cure” to “force women back into the appropriate sphere of culture” (Perkins Gilman Hysteria Lecture, Suarez). Essentially, this entails that women were to “dumb down” for men and praise the male population. The rest cure was mainly designed to suppress women’s brains and their intelligence. Mitchell believed that women should not be educated for it would damage their brains and ultimately lead them to hysteria. What the rest cure did was make women go insane, seen in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The woman in this story goes insane as she endures the rest cure. She believes the wallpaper has women in it and they are trying to escape. At the end of the story, she tears down
