On the morning of June 18, 1860, the county sheriff arrived at the home of Elizabeth Packard.
He was there to take her to an asylum. She had not been given a hearing. She had not been examined in any proceeding she was aware of. She had simply disagreed with her husband.
Elizabeth Packard was a mother of six who had committed the unforgivable act of expressing religious views that differed from her husband’s. When she announced she might worship with the Methodists, Reverend Theophilus Packard decided his wife was insane. He arranged for a doctor named J.W. Brown to visit their home disguised as a sewing machine salesman. During their conversation, Elizabeth complained about her husband’s domination. Dr. Brown later testified he “had not the slightest difficulty in concluding that she was hopelessly insane.” His evidence? She had complained about her husband. She had refused to shake his hand. And she was over the age of forty.
In Illinois at the time, a husband could have his wife committed without her consent, without a public hearing, and without the evidence of insanity required for anyone else. Elizabeth spent three years locked inside the Jacksonville Insane Asylum. When she was finally released, she discovered her husband had rented their home to strangers, sold the furniture, taken the children, and left the state.
Elizabeth Packard was not insane. She was independent. And in the nineteenth century, female independence was its own diagnosis.
What Nellie Bly Found Behind the Doors
Twenty-seven years after Elizabeth Packard was locked away, a young journalist named Nellie Bly talked her way into Blackwell’s Island—New York’s most notorious asylum—to see for herself what happened to women once the doors closed behind them.
As I wrote about in my recent post, Bly went undercover to get committed. She stopped bathing. She stopped brushing her hair. She spent hours in front of a mirror practicing the performance of mental instability, then checked into a boarding house under a false name and screamed at the tenants for twenty-four hours until police intervened. Within days, she was declared hopelessly insane and sent through the system—first Bellevue, then Blackwell’s Island.
