Sylvia had it right even before Betty Friedan

The victim of an unrelenting summer cold, I sit propped on pillows in bed re-reading The Bell Jar. I am too exhausted to practice the piano (my scolding brain chastises me with, if Chopin could compose and play with tuberculosis, then you should be able to also) Before picking up my ancient paperback copy of The Bell Jar I had made a brief stab at reading the poems of Philip Larkin and a formidable book by George Perle called Serial Composition and Atonality. I realized that I just could not focus on anything difficult. Curtiss and I had been having a conversation and suddenly the idea of revisiting the original Girl, Interrupted came to me. My copy of BJ had come from the Newton recycling center's book swap shed--it looks as though it had survived a fire, the covers are motheaten, and someone's pink highlighter and red pen have invaded the text here and there.

This autobiographical novel, written in the Mad Men era before Plath took her own life in 1963, is even darker than Mad Men (and that's difficult to achieve)  It contains some beautiful descriptive writing indicative of the great poet she was.  It is unmistakably the product of a depressed mind, a lost soul, a self-aware and self-conscious genius who had the misfortune to be born a woman in an era when women were taken even less seriously than we are today.  Her insights on the "private, totalitarian state" of marriage do not refer solely to her own dismal marriage to Ted Hughes in 1957.

I have not yet reached the famous shock therapy part of the novel.  When I first read the book in college,  this resonated with me because I had my own "schizo-affective" breakdown at age 18 resulting in a brief hospitalization.  Although I was never given electroconvulsive therapy, there were patients on the ward who had been.  They were like zombies, drifting around in a fog of lost memory, and I dreaded that I might be the next to join them.  I did undergo an electroencephalogram (EEG) which all entering patients had to take.  I will never forget the science-fiction creepiness of a dozen electrodes clipped to various parts of my scalp.  It was never explained to me what this procedure was for.  I could have written my own book about my experiences in Thompkins One Ward at Yale-New Haven Hospital in the summer of 1971, and indeed I chronicled this experience in my journals which have since disappeared.  I have never been able to rid myself of the fear that someday this episode will be used against me, and I have no doubt that it exists to this day in some dossier or dossiers held by some sinister government agency.

But I digress.

In 1963, the same year as Sylvia's suicide, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published, widely regarded as the seminal tome of the women's liberation movement.
"The problem that has no name" was soon to have a name: sexism, or its vaguely synonymous "male chauvinism." The following are quotes from Plath and Friedan:

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband...it would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.  This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's...   Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

...I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers
so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines...By noon I'm ready for a padded cell.  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

It should be noted that Friedan is quoting a woman with a PhD in anthropology who became "a Nebraska housewife with three children."  And that Sylvia Plath, the girl with fifteen years of straight A's, became one of our greatest poets but ended up a housewife married to another lesser poet.  And then ended up with her head in a gas oven, finally a successful suicide after two failed attempts.

For some reason, the name on her tombstone reads "Sylvia Plath Hughes" and is subject to constant attempts by feminists to scrape off the "Hughes." Ted Hughes presumably made the decision to append his own name to hers, as though her being his wife was more important than her status as a poet.  This is why I kept my maiden (father's!) name when I married my ex-husband.  Women don't own their own names.  Still.

It has become fashionable to demean the work of Sylvia Plath, but reading her poetry proves that she deserves her laurels.  Perhaps nothing could have dissuaded her from taking her life, even though I like to think that if she had not been in the gilded cage of mid-century middle-class womanhood, she might eventually have gained the desire to live.  I myself have contemplated that dark place and stood upon the edge of the abyss.  
Yet even though the world remains hostile or indifferent to women of genius, I will not go to that place again.  I made the decision to live for art's sake and for the sake of those I love.