They Called Her Hysterical

On the pathologising of women's wildness, the myth of the nuclear family, and the revolution that begins in the womb

What if everything you were told about motherhood was designed to keep you small?

The MotherWild Revolution is the book I wrote from the floor — literally. From shower floors and bedroom floors and the floors of a life that collapsed so completely during my pregnancy that I had no choice but to rebuild it from the root.

It is part memoir, part manifesto, part medicine.

It will not comfort you. But it will tell you the truth.

You can order it, here.

So you have a prieview, below are some of the themes and direct transmissions / writings from the book.

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There is a word that has followed women through history like a shadow.

Hysterical.

It has been used to dismiss us, medicate us, institutionalise us. To explain away our rage, our grief, our knowing. To contain the parts of us that refused to be contained.

What most people don’t know — what I didn’t fully reckon with until I became a mother myself — is where that word comes from.

Hystera. Greek. Meaning: womb.

Until 1980, Hysterical Neurosis was a formal psychiatric diagnosis. Any woman who behaved in ways deemed socially unacceptable could be labelled hysterical and prescribed medication. The surgical procedure designed to remove a woman’s uterus — a hysterectomy — carries the same etymological root.

Read that again.

The medical establishment named the removal of a woman’s womb after the condition they invented to describe what happened when she was too much. Too feeling. Too wild. Too unwilling to shrink.

They pathologised the very source of her power. And then, when that power became too inconvenient, they removed it.

This is not ancient history.

This is the water we are still swimming in.

The Myth of the Nuclear Family

We have been sold a story.

That the ideal unit for raising children is two adults, contained within four walls, largely isolated from extended family and community, expected to function as breadwinners, caregivers, emotional regulators, and romantic partners — simultaneously, indefinitely, without collapse.

It is a fundamentally flawed model.

And mothers are paying the price.

Before industrialisation, women gave birth at home, surrounded by their female lineage. The raising of children was held by the whole community — not outsourced to a single exhausted dyad. The saying it takes a village was not a platitude. It was architecture. It was how life actually worked.

We dismantled that architecture in the name of progress. In the name of the nuclear family. In the name of an economy that required independent, productive household units rather than interdependent, nourishing communities.

And now we wonder why mothers are depleted. Why postnatal depression rates are soaring. Why women are screaming into pillows when no one is listening — releasing, as I did, not just their own pain, but the accumulated grief of every mother who came before them without a village to hold her.

I want to be clear about something: what we call postnatal depression is largely postnatal depletion. It is not a chemical malfunction. It is the entirely rational response of a woman who has been asked to do the impossible — to birth new life, rewire her entire neurophysiology, and return to normal — all within a system that was never designed to support her.

There is no normal to return to. There never was.

This is the work of Dr. Oscar Serralach in his body of work The Postnatal Depletion Cure. I have been a student of his, over the last year, studying Matriarchal Medicine.

You can purchase his book, here.

The Sterilisation of Wildness

In Australia, 1 in 9 women of reproductive age are affected by endometriosis. Polycystic ovary syndrome affects up to 13% of reproductive-age women — with 70% remaining undiagnosed. Infertility now affects 1 in 6 Australian couples.

We are not simply talking about health statistics.

We are talking about a civilisation that has been systematically severing women from their own bodies.

The birth control pill. Unnecessary hysterectomies. Medical interventions that alter female anatomy and suppress hormonal cycles. Anything that subdues a woman’s cycle, subdues her true nature. It suppresses her wild creative energy. It keeps her manageable. Productive. Quiet.

And the mythology runs deep. Lilith — Adam’s first wife in some traditions — refused to lie beneath him. She believed they were equal. For this, she was cast out of Eden, demonised, called a succubus, written out of the sacred texts. Eve, the compliant one, took her place.

This is the story that has been running in the unconscious psyche of our civilisation for millennia.

Powerful women are dangerous. Wild women must be contained. The womb — that extraordinary portal of creation, that seat of feminine gnosis — is either a problem to be managed or a resource to be extracted from.

We have forgotten that the womb is sacred.

We have forgotten that a woman connected to her cycle is connected to nature itself. That her wildness is not pathology — it is intelligence. That her rage is not disorder — it is truth.

The Revolution

I wrote The MotherWild Revolution from the wreckage of my own initiation into motherhood.

Abandoned by my partner in my first trimester. Losing my business. Losing my home. Navigating single parenthood while running a company, healing birth trauma, and attempting to raise a highly sensitive child in a world that does not know what to do with sensitivity.

I am not sharing this to be pitied.

I am sharing it because I believe the wound I experienced — of not being held, not being supported, not being seen in one of the most vulnerable passages of my life — is not mine alone. It belongs to all of us. It is woven into the fabric of a culture that has forgotten how to honour the mother.

And I believe that when we forget the mother, we forget everything.

We forget how to tend to the earth. How to be in community. How to receive love without performing productivity. How to raise children who feel safe enough in their own bodies to eventually make the world safer for others.

The revolution we are seeking — the one that addresses climate crisis, relational collapse, the epidemic of disconnection — will not arrive through policy alone.

It will arrive when mothers are finally held.

When wildness is finally welcomed back.

When the womb is returned to its rightful place — not as a problem, not as a resource, but as the sacred origin point of everything we value as human beings.

The MotherWild Revolution is available now.