Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight

Introduction

Introduction In t h e spr ing of 1875, a distraught Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the slain president, was involuntarily committed to a private mental hospital in Batavia , Illinois, by a court order requested by her son, Robert Lincoln. Fifteen years earlier, an unknown Illinois woman named Elizabeth Packard was also involuntarily committed to a state mental hospital in Jacksonville. There are remarkable connections between the two cases. Both women contested their confinement, both were examined and declared insane by Dr. Andrew McFarland, both had explored Spiritualism, and both were befriended by Chicago attorneys and activists James and Myra Bradwell. For three decades following her release, Elizabeth Packard traveled the United States lobbying for laws to protect the civil rights of married women and the mentally ill. Historians have noted that the Illinois laws that governed Mary Lincoln’s institutionalization in 1875were among the most stringent in the nation because of Packard’s reforms. Among these laws was Packard’s law requiring a jury trial at which individuals might defend their sanity prior to commitment. The law was intended to prevent false commitment of individuals by relatives with perfidious motives; however, opponents decried it as a public humiliation of the insane and their families. In practice, Robert Lincoln’s lawyers subverted the law by notifying Mrs. Lincoln of her impending trial only a few hours beforehand and by then appointing a lawyer for her who supported her commitment. It was, however, Packard’s law protecting the rights of mental patients to send and receive mail that enabled Mrs. Lincoln to correspond with attorneys James and Myra Bradwell, who then pressed successfully for her release.1 Elizabeth Packard’s resistance of her own commitment and the laws she was later instrumental in passing changed the jurisprudence of insanity in the United States. As one historian has noted, “modern-day civil commitment codes have their genesis” in Packard’s campaign.2 After Packard, involuntary commitment and management of mental institutions in the United States would be shrouded in legislation protecting the civil liberties of those deemed insane. Who then was Elizabeth Packard and what propelled her into the role of reformer ?PackardwasthewifeofReverendTheophilusPackard,Jr.who,alarmed at her heretical religious ideas, exasperated by her assertiveness, and appalled at her suggested affair with another man, declared her insane. Confined for three years in the Illinois Hospital for the Insane under the care of Dr. Andrew McFarland, Packard emerged from the asylum in1863determinedtocampaign for laws to protect the personal liberty of those alleged to be insane. Unable under existing laws to recover her children or personal property from her husband, she also became an advocate for equal rights for married women. Packard called her story “The Great Drama,” and indeed it was. With tales of a heartless husband, a conspiring doctor, a mother torn from her children, and unrequited love, Hollywood could write no better plot. Indeed to some, her story seems like a clichéd romance employing stale themes of a wronged, but strong, woman beset by male tyrants and villains. However, historians of women will recognize themes of oppression and struggle for identity and voice that have been repeated in generation after generation of women from ancient times to the present. Still, to know Elizabeth Packard, the historian must look beyond both the melodrama of her books and her representations of herself as victim and heroine. Despite the drama in her writing, Packard did not thrive on public attention or spectacle. She did not, for example, join the lyceum circuit or appear in popular public forums, as did other public women of her day. Instead, she approached her public work methodically, one might even say “professionally,” following the example of her antithesis, Dorothea Dix. She sought out powerful reformers (Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips) and politicians (President Ulysses S. Grant, state governors, and legislators) to advance her cause and worked to influence them personally as well through pen and press. As she worked for asylum reform, she became increasingly knowledgeable about new practices in asylum management and the legalities surrounding commitment laws. In studying the whole of her life, it becomes evident that her appeals for reform were based on much more than the emotion and melodrama of her personal story. A public figure from the 1860s to the 1890s, Packard gained national notoriety as she lobbied legislatures, literally, from coast to coast. However, unlike Dorothea Dix, Packard won few friends in America’s fledgling psychiatric profession. While Dix worked with asylum...