'Emotionality' is associated with sentimentality, histrionics, melodrama, excitement, mawkishness, and effusiveness. Women are told, 'Don't be so emotional'. Here are some synonyms for being emotional: sentimental, demonstrative, effusive, and temperamental. Emotionality is usually seen as the opposite of rational or effective.

The idea that women are emotional but not men got codified in the 19th century when physicians attributed women's problems to hysteria—a term referring to a wandering uterus—which caused ungovernable emotional excess.1 Hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women who were seen as emotional and unstable, and likely to develop behavioral problems. Of course, men couldn't be diagnosed with ungovernable emotional excess because they didn't have a uterus!

The idea of women's emotionality didn't get challenged until the feminist movement in the mid-20th century when increasing numbers of women in the biological and social sciences began to challenge this characterization of women along with many other traditional ideas about women.2

Psychologist Agneta Fischer has challenged the way that we use the concept of emotionality.3 She offers four arguments for the misuse of emotionality:

Emotionality is a descriptor of people, particularly women, and reduces all our emotional experiences to one personality characteristic. It doesn't tell us if the person is sad, happy, angry, lonely, or joyful, nor why he or she is experiencing such a feeling.

Fischer admonishes us not to speak of emotionality as a sex-specific disposition or personality trait. Instead, we should acknowledge that emotions are largely........

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