[Go take care of yourself, your factory is sick: the place of mass hysteria in the problem of women's health at work].

Mass hysteria is defined as the epidemic occurrence of a series of physical symptoms in the absence of organic disorder and identifiable pathogen agents. In spite of substantial individual and contextual variations, there are striking similarities that unite the different episodes reported in the literature: existence of a triggering event, progression and rapid regression of unrelated symptoms, and cases involving predominantly women. The authors summarize research in that field and discuss the overrepresentation of women through hypotheses linked with: 1) biology and the weight of differential socialization of women and men; 2) the poor evaluation of environmental, organizational and ergonomical risks in areas where mass hysteria is witnessed. Feminist interpretation tacitly confronts the preconcept notion of feminine vulnerability in order to shed light on the fact that women's adverse working conditions are indeed underestimated.