Searching for an Architecture Beyond the Bell Jar
What kinds of spaces exist where women can breathe without being watched?
If hysteria no longer exists as a diagnosis, why does its architecture remain?
These questions anchor the final chapter. I am not asking what went wrong, nor do I seek a historical verdict. Instead, the question asked is why the spatial logics developed to manage hysterical women continue to organise contemporary environments of care, safety, and everyday life. If the diagnosis has been discredited, what explains the persistence of its walls?
This chapter turns outward and forward, treating architecture not as a passive inheritance but as a site of ethical possibility. It asks how fear became tangible in built form—and whether care can be imagined without reproducing that fear. Rather than proposing solutions, it stays with uncertainty, asking what support feels like when it is not disguised as control.
The Afterlives of Hysteria
Although hysteria has been removed from medical manuals—most notably with the elimination of “hysterical neurosis” from the DSM-III in 1980—its spatial afterlives remain deeply embedded. The diagnosis may no longer exist, but the environments shaped by its logics continue to persist, often unexamined and merely renamed.
In hospitals, women’s pain continues to be underestimated, dismissed, or psychologized. While hysteria has disappeared from diagnostic manuals, its architectural logic persists. The open ward has been replaced by the curtained cubicle; the public demonstration by the teaching round.
Yet the fundamental spatial condition remains the same: the medicalised female body is designed to be seen. Observation is constant, explanation minimal. The patient’s body is visible; her voice remains secondary. In psychiatric facilities, women’s wards frequently impose stricter controls than men’s. Movement is limited “for safety.”
Feminist psychiatric scholarship has long shown that such safety logics are unevenly applied. Studies by Goffman and Chesler, alongside WHO reports, document how women’s wards are more likely to be locked, segregated, and closely monitored—often in response to perceived vulnerability or moral risk rather than clinical assessment.
Architectural layouts of historic and contemporary institutions reinforce this disparity, translating social anxiety about women’s bodies into spatial restriction. Autonomy is negotiated, rarely assumed. Surveillance is justified as care, echoing nineteenth-century logics with updated language.
The urban planning and design reproduce cities with a similar pattern. Guarded zones are not designed by women, but for women—by institutions that assume female presence must be regulated. Safe routes are not emancipatory corridors; they are narrow channels of permitted movement, shaped by lighting, policing, and surveillance. Though no longer justified through medical diagnoses, these spaces continue to operate within the same disciplinary logic that once produced hysteria: care as control, protection as spatial containment.
Domestic architecture reproduces its own residues. Through layout and expectation, homes assign women to caregiving roles. Kitchens, bedrooms, and living spaces organise labour, availability, and emotional presence, not independence.
These environments do not declare themselves as disciplinary. They present themselves as neutral, practical, even benevolent. Yet they sustain the same logic that once justified hysteria: they position women as bodies in need of regulation. These spatial arrangements feminise care and postpone autonomy. The persistence of these spatial patterns suggests that hysteria’s true legacy is not diagnostic, but cultural. Women’s autonomy continues to be framed as a risk—emotional, moral, physical—that architecture must mitigate.
Independence is often read as exposure. Privacy is interpreted as danger. Unsupervised movement is treated as negligence. These assumptions shape design decisions long before they become explicit policies. Architecture absorbs these beliefs quietly. Surveillance becomes the default. Barriers multiply. Access is controlled “just in case.” The built environment begins to anticipate women’s failure, vulnerability, or transgression, rather than their competence.
This is not always intentional. Often, spatial controls governing women’s movement are not deliberately designed but are inherited, embedded within building codes, institutional typologies, and professional “best practices” that treat restriction as technical common sense rather than ideology.
In India, the National Building Code of India (NBC 2016) normalises controlled access, guarded entries, and surveillance-oriented circulation in hostels and residential institutions under safety provisions outlined in Part 3 (Development Control Rules and General Building Requirements) and Part 4 (Fire and Life Safety), without addressing their gendered application in practice (BIS, 2016). University-level hostel regulations and municipal PG bylaws further mandate single-entry layouts, visitor registers, restricted visiting hours, curfews, and continuous wardens’ supervision for women’s accommodation, translating social anxiety into spatial and temporal control (UGC, 2011; State Hostel Guidelines).
Typologically, the women’s hostel has stabilised as an inward-facing, corridor-dominated layout with limited exits and close proximity to authority figures, a configuration reproduced across regions with minimal interrogation (Sharma, 2018). Professional safety frameworks such as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) reinforce this inheritance by prioritising visibility, access control, and surveillance as neutral design strategies, despite feminist critiques demonstrating their disproportionate impact on women’s autonomy and freedom of movement (Newman, 1972; Kern, 2020).
Repeated across codes, manuals, and precedent projects, these measures cease to register as fear and instead become embedded as technical necessity, aesthetic order, and responsible design—quietly reshaping the built environment to anticipate women’s vulnerability or transgression rather than their competence (Foucault, 1977). The danger lies precisely in this inheritance. When fear becomes habitual, it no longer appears as fear.
The result is a paradox: spaces designed to protect women often restrict them most.
Care Ethics as a Spatial Lens
To move beyond this paradox, care must be reframed—not as moral intention, but as spatial practice. Care Ethics, articulated by scholars such as Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, offers a crucial shift. Care is not a feeling; it is a relationship. It is not about control, but attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect.
When applied to architecture, Care Ethics challenges foundational assumptions. It asks not how to manage bodies, but how to support relationships. It resists standardisation and instead emphasises context, diversity, and interdependence.
A care-based spatial lens does not assume vulnerability as a deficiency. It recognises dependency as universal and situational. Everyone requires support at different moments. The problem is not the need itself, but how environments respond to it.
This reframing destabilises the historical association between care and confinement. It suggests that support does not require surveillance, and safety does not require restriction. It opens the possibility that architecture could attend without enclosing.
Vulnerability Without Shame
Vulnerability without shame requires a rejection of the idea that exposure is a natural feminine condition. As Simone de Beauvoir argues, women are not born but made; as Judith Butler extends, gender itself is performed through repeated social and spatial norms. Vulnerability, then, is not biological destiny but a product of the structures that render certain bodies more visible, more dependent, and more governable than others.
Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability deepens this shift. Butler argues that vulnerability is not a personal failing but a shared condition of being human. Bodies are always exposed to each other, to environments, to institutions, and to power. The danger arises not from vulnerability itself, but from the unequal ways in which it is distributed, intensified, and managed. Some bodies are rendered more exposed than others, not by nature, but by design.
Architecturally, this insight is transformative. If vulnerability is universal, then spaces that punish, regulate, or isolate vulnerable bodies become ethically suspect. Why are certain forms of dependency met with care and accommodation, while others are met with surveillance, restriction, and control? Why is fragility treated as a collective responsibility in some contexts, and as an individual deficiency in others?
Historically, women’s vulnerability has been framed as excess—too emotional, too fragile, too unstable. Architecture has often responded by constraining, monitoring, and enclosing. Butler’s reframing exposes the violence embedded in this response. Vulnerability does not demand discipline; it demands care without humiliation, support without suspicion, and protection without the loss of agency.
This does not mean eliminating boundaries or denying risk. Rather, it means questioning why fear so often becomes the primary organising principle of space—and why certain bodies are always the ones asked to surrender autonomy in the name of safety.
When Surveillance Is No Longer the Default
What design choices emerge when surveillance is no longer assumed to be necessary? This question does not seek a checklist; it seeks a shift in orientation. Surveillance has become so embedded in contemporary design that it is rarely named. Cameras, observation points, controlled access, and monitoring technologies are treated as neutral tools. Yet surveillance carries a history. For women, being watched has rarely meant being protected. It has meant being evaluated, corrected, and restrained.
An architecture beyond the bell jar begins by questioning this reflex. It asks when visibility becomes exposure, and when protection becomes intrusion. It recognises that constant observation can erode trust rather than build safety. Such architecture would not eliminate uncertainty. It would allow it—without punishment. It would make room for withdrawal, rest, and opacity. It would recognise that care sometimes means not intervening.
Rather than asking what care looks like, I want to ask what care feels like. Feeling is not secondary here; it is diagnostic. Support feels like choice. It feels like the ability to enter and exit without explanation. It feels like spaces that do not demand performance—of wellness, gratitude, or compliance. Control, by contrast, feels like anticipation: being managed before one has acted, occupying architectures that presume failure. The distinction is subtle but crucial. Many environments claim to support women while quietly enforcing obedience. Care ethics insists on listening to lived experience rather than design intention. When does safety become control? Often precisely when it refuses to ask this question.
Modern institutions remain deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty. Risk management drives design. Liability shapes layout. Predictability becomes a virtue. Yet human life—particularly women’s lives—does not conform to predictable scripts. Emotional complexity, grief, resistance, exhaustion, and transformation are not design failures; they are conditions of being alive. An architecture that fears uncertainty will always seek to contain it.
An architecture of care must learn to hold it. But care cannot be designed in isolation. Architecture operates within the limits of social consent; it reflects what communities are prepared to allow, regulate, and tolerate. The task before architects is not only to design differently, but to make visible the assumptions embedded in space—so that communities can choose to transform them. Only then can architecture move beyond containment toward forms of care that are not gendered, guarded, or afraid.
This does not mean romanticising instability or rejecting structure. It means designing spaces that can adapt without punishing deviation—spaces that allow slowness, ambiguity, and non-linearity without marking them as threats. Such an architecture does not resolve tension. It sustains it ethically.
Beyond Inheritance: Conclusion — A Space That Breathes
I am not arguing that architects must atone for their past, but rather that architects must stop repeating it unconsciously. The bell jar persists not because designers intend harm, but because its logic has been normalised. Surveillance continues to masquerade as safety. Control continues to masquerade as care. Fear continues to masquerade as responsibility.
To imagine architecture beyond the bell jar is not to propose a new typology, but to refuse an old assumption: that women must be managed in order to be protected. This assumption has shaped spaces for centuries—from the witch’s cell to the asylum ward to the contemporary clinic—not as isolated moments of cruelty, but as a continuous spatial logic. What changes are the materials and technologies; what remains is the belief that the female body requires regulation.
Through this essay, I am tracing that trajectory not to assign blame, but to understand how fear became form. Architecture did not merely reflect social anxieties about women; it helped organise them, stabilise them, and make them feel inevitable. If architecture once taught women how to be contained, it must now learn how to listen.
I do not believe the ward has to remain a bell jar. But neither can architects and the relevant stakeholders pretend innocence. For women to be able to breathe without being watched requires more than empathy or better intentions. It requires refusing the reflex to control. It requires questioning why visibility is so often treated as a virtue, why safety is so often equated with surveillance, and why care is so rarely allowed to exist without discipline.
Architecture can remain a site of management, or it can become a site of listening. That choice is not abstract. It is made daily—in plans and sections, in building codes and security protocols, in the small, routine decisions that determine who is seen, who is protected, and who is trusted.
The final question therefore remains deliberately open:
What kind of space allows women to breathe without being watched?
Architecture cannot answer this alone.
But it can stop closing the question.
