Elizabeth Packard Child Custody Pioneer
When Elizabeth Packard’s husband of 20 years committed her to an insane asylum and abandoned her, taking their six children. She fought back. And won.
***
We complain about gender bias in the court today, but in the 1800s in the UK and U.S., a man could commit his wife to an insane asylum without her consent. He disagrees with her political opinions? Her childrearing? Her emotional state? His word was enough to deem her “hysterical” and institutionalize her. In Britain, this practice didn’t end until the Lunacy Act of 1890.
Such confinement was a trope in many popular works of 19th century fiction. Probably the most well-known example is in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), where love object Mr. Rochester has a mad wife locked in his attic. (We’re supposed to feel sorry for him, a literary case of himpathy. In fairness, Bertha did try to burn his house down…)
But there were many actual legal cases of men committing their wives to insane asylums.
- Louisa Nottidge (1846) — Kidnapped by relatives and confined in a private asylum because she joined a religious sect.
- Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1858) — The novelist and estranged wife of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was forcibly taken to an asylum after publicly criticizing him. Among her sins, she wrote a novel about his infidelities Cheveley, or, The Man of Honour.
- Harriet Mordaunt (1870) — Lady Mordaunt was declared insane during divorce proceedings after her husband accused her of infidelity. (His infidelities were apparently beside the point.) She spent 36 years in confinement until her death.
- Ann Priscilla Holmes (1864) — Her husband had her locked up at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for “domestic trouble.”
Why the history lesson, Tracy?
Because it’s good to remember that women fought long and hard for divorce reform and women’s rights. I can advise you to “leave a cheater, gain a life” and it’s actually possible to leave AND have a life thanks to the courageous activists who came before us. One such badass was Elizabeth Packard.
Who was Elizabeth Packard?
Before she got married off to the dreaded Reverend Theophilus Packard (14 years her senior) in 1839, Elizabeth was a teacher. An educated woman who studied French and algebra. But her parents insisted she marry and she dutifully did and had six children with Theophilus, a Calvinist preacher.
As wife appliances go, however, Elizabeth had a few fatal flaws. She openly disagreed with her husband’s religious and political views. Particularly on the issue of slavery. Elizabeth supported abolitionist John Brown. Her husband did not. He found her public remarks embarrassing.
So in 1860, he judged that his wife was “slightly insane.” From Wikipedia.
He arranged for a doctor, J.W. Brown, to speak with her. The doctor pretended to be a sewing machine salesman. During their conversation, Elizabeth complained of her husband’s domination and his accusations to others that she was insane. Brown reported this conversation to Theophilus (along with the observation that Mrs. Packard “exhibited a great dislike to me”). Theophilus decided to have Elizabeth committed. She learned of this decision on June 18, 1860, when the county sheriff arrived at the Packard home to take her into custody
Her youngest child is 2 years old at this point.
Elizabeth Packard spent the next three years at the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois. Despite repeated questioning, she refused to agree that she was insane or to recant her views.
History reports that her children petitioned the court to have her released. (I cannot imagine that Theophilus was much fun as a parent either.) So, the doctors declared her “incurable” and discharged her, whereupon her husband locked her in a room and nailed the windows shut.
And yet she persisted.
She managed to slip a letter out to a friend, who reported Elizabeth’s abuse to a judge, who decided to have a jury trial about her sanity.
I’m wondering at this point why we’re not having a jury trial about Theophilus’s sanity? HE IMPRISONED HIS WIFE. But apparently that’s a big whatever in the 1860s.
The jury deliberated for 7 minutes and declared Elizabeth was sane.
But any of you who have suffered post-separation abuse from a FW can probably guess what happened next.
When Elizabeth Packard returned to the home she shared with her husband in Manteno, Illinois, she found that the night before her release, her husband had rented their home to another family, sold her furniture, had taken her money, notes, wardrobe and children, and had left the state
Yes. He took her kids again and abandoned her.
But this badass was not done.
Elizabeth Packard became a social reformer.
Completely broke and alone, she started the Anti-Insane Asylum Society. She went on the road denouncing the insane asylum laws, restrictions on women’s freedom of speech, and demanded reform of child custody laws.
Turns out, she was an amazing public speaker, so good in fact that she traveled around the country and became a national celebrity. That work earned her enough money to support herself and her children.
Perhaps it was this financial independence that made it possible to pay off her husband. Theophilus got to live off her life’s earnings, but agreed to cede custody. The children moved to Chicago to live with Elizabeth and she never saw her FW husband again.
Here are a few things Elizabeth Packard accomplished:
- She petitioned the Illinois and Massachusetts to allow married women equal rights to property and custody of their children and succeeded in 1869.
- She founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society to reform consent laws and the conditions in those asylums.
- She published several books, including Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864), Great Disclosure of Spiritual Wickedness in High Places (1865), The Mystic Key or the Asylum Secret Unlocked (1866), and The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868).
- She got laws passed in three states to guarantee that all people accused of insanity, including wives, had the right to a public hearing.
#Mighty
If you want to learn more about this astonishing independent woman, read The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore.
Don’t forget Catherine Dickens, whom Charles tried to commit in 1858 after twenty years’ marriage and ten children, following the mother of all smear campaigns. When he couldn’t find a doctor to go along with this plan, he instead forced her to sign an early version of an NDA in exchange for a living allowance and a modest flat. Their eldest was allowed to see his mother after she was banished, but she was largely cut out of the other children’s lives.
Yes, I once went to the Dickens museum in London and her letters to him were pitiful. It looks like he slept with her sister too. Lots of misogynistic ick.
Dickens apparently did this after his wife confronted him about his affair with a teenage fan.
Speculation has it that JFK also committed Jackie to a psychiatric hospital and had her subjected to shock treatment after she confronted him over his cheating. The story tends to be given a little credence considering the way Joseph Kennedy arranged a forced lobotomy for his daughter Rosemary because she was being slutty, partying too much and embarrassing the family.
Didn’t JFK, RFK, and their father also compete with each other to see who could sleep with more women?
I think they all shared more than one mistress. JFK also preyed on at least one teen intern.
These guys suuuuucked.
Being half Irish, I recognize the particular brand of Irish narcissism that the Kennedys represented. The only difference between regular narcissism and Irish narcissism is that Irish frauds might actually put their lives at risk for the sake of image management which I suspect is why so many Kennedys ended up getting themselves assassinated by the powers of darkness.
Because Ireland is historically an embattled rebel culture, I think it kind of ups the ante and requires more genuine danger in terms what it takes to play “hero.” For example, JFK was in the process of taking on the military industrial complex before he died and was also combating institutional racism. RFK took on institutional racism and the mob. Both of them took on the chemical industry by supporting Silent Spring author Rachel Carson when she was being attacked by terrifying industrial giants Monsanto and Dow. But both were also arshole cheaters who championed certain extremely undemocratic policies. Go figure.
FWIW, I’m Gen X, and throughout my childhood, my parents made me believe I was “genetically disordered” and thus unable to interact with other people (when, in reality, they sabotaged most of my attempts of connecting with people outside the family). Somehow, they also made me believe that other adults would have killed me as a baby because I was so “defective”. In adolescence, my greatest fear was that they might get me committed to a psychiatric hospital when I turned 18 (even if I was an extremely well-behaved A+ student). The fact that my father was a judge (family court, even – I wish I was making this up) didn’t make me feel any safer. Maybe it is no coincidence that I chose journalism as my first career, even if this didn’t match my personality all that well. The public visibility I gained as a journalist made me feel a little bit safer. I also happen to be a person who has always been quite anxious and nervous. Maybe this is no coincidence, either.
Your story reminds me of the French film Amelie. Since you share the name, I’m sure you’ve seen it– about a character who was raised in isolation because her parents irrationally decided she was sickly and the trauma of that experience had something to do with her adult passion for righting wrongs.
If you feel vulnerable to injustice, it’s a great instinct to choose a career that provides visibility and a public platform. At least if anyone tries to take you or your loved ones down, it won’t happen in obscurity and silence. It’s why whistleblowers for fraught causes are advised not to hide but to grab the spotlight even when it’s the last thing they want to do. It makes intimidation campaigns and extrajudicial assassination a bit trickier to pull off.
Just maddening how many awful people are allowed to act like God in the form of family law judges!
Sadly, this has contributed to the sense of shame and even guilt I feel over my own childhood: How many other people besides me has this man possibly harmed? However, I have to remind myself that I was just a child and I had absolutely no control over his actions. Furthermore, I cut off all contact with my family once I had reached my late 20s, had landed a relatively stable job as a journalist and the spackle/captor bonding had started wearing off.
Back when I worked in advocacy for survivors of DV, we had one teenage client whose abuser was not a partner but her father– also a family court judge.
We usually worked with adults and were a bit nervous about the legal ramifications of interfacing with a minor. But, as long as she remained technically anonymous, we had plausible deniability in case her POS dad decided to make waves. She did let her name slip at a group meeting but there was no record of it and we couldn’t turn her away so took the risk. We gave her the same advice as every other survivor, which was to check their state’s recording laws and, if not illegal, to secretly record any incidents of abuse and hold onto the evidence in case they needed it.
Mostly what I remember about the girl (about 15 at the time) was that, other than sharing details of the violent and quasi-sexualized abuse (bare-bottomed whippings) her father was subjecting her and her mother to, she was a typical monosyllabic teen. Uh huh, yeah, nah. It made it unclear whether anything was reaching her. But, as it turns out, she took in every single word of what she was hearing from other survivors and advocates and then some. By the time she was technically an adult, she had turned herself into an eloquent boss of a national advocate.
Last I heard of her, she was doing the cable news circuit describing why she recorded her father’s assaults and why she publicly exposed him as a violent abuser in order to get him disbarred and thrown off the bench. She said someone that sick should not have the power to make decisions that affected families.
It made me realize that victims of people who wield political power also suffer the added burden of feeling “responsible” for what these monsters do to other people. This girl’s remedy for it was a full takedown but not every victim has the means or support to do this. As it happens, this girl also managed to rescue her own mother which strongly suggests that she had her mother’s love and emotional support. Even if her mother was weakened and broken by years of abuse, they still had each other and I think that was the deciding factor. No child could ever do this alone.
My mother kept subjecting my father to frequent ridicule and put-downs, but was fully on board with my abuse or even the driving force (the claims about my “genetic disorder” came from her, for example). My father was a raving misogynist and a creep, but otherwise very passive and withdrawn (except for infrequent and unpredictable outbursts of scary anger). Due to some otherwise inexplicable physical features, I am not even sure he was my biological father. Maybe this was some kind of “sham marriage” to conceal the fact that he wasn’t really into women, at least not grown-up ones.
Publicly exposing them never looked like a viable option to me. On the one hand, I was scared of legal repercussions, but on the other hand, many people seemed to perceive my parents as pathetic and a hot mess anyway (they may have been covert alcoholics for decades as well). It seems that the only people scared of them happened to be me plus probably everyone who had to face him in court as well as other people they subjected to legal threats.
It even seemed to be my main “job” as a child to continuously prop up their public image. However, there was always this looming threat of either serious physical harm (especially while I was small) or something like involuntary commitment if I failed to meet those unspoken expectations. Objectively speaking, they were probably much less mentally stable than I was, but their projections were very convincing (at least to me), and maybe they would have been able to fool some professionals as well, using my father’s connections and his inside knowledge of the system. I just could never be sure.
I guess there is a sense of guilt and moral injury over having done so much “PR” for them while I was little, even if I had to do this just in order to survive. My mere existence on this planet may have supported my father’s image as a “proper heterosexual man” (during very homophobic times) and thus helped advance his career as a judge.
Worse, the operation was done without anesthesia! Also, he justified what he did based on Nazi eugenics, which he was a huge fan of. He actually called her a “defective product.” My theory is that he sexually abused her and his real motive for the lobotomy was preventing her from telling. That perverted monster absolutely was capable of sexually abusing his daughter.
He also raped Gloria Swanson and fucked his son’s girlfriends.
JFK got a teenage babysitter pregnant and made female staffers get under his desk to blow him. He coerced them into sex with his cronies while he watched. He infected Jackie with STIs repeatedly. The list of disgusting Kennedy antics goes on and on.
Chillingly, FW once called me a defective product too, those exact words. I’m eternally grateful to be living in a time when he couldn’t have had me committed or lobotomized.
My ex had similar things to say — how I was mentally ill with delusions and an inability to survive without him. He told his family that I was potentially dangerous and that he “had” to flee.
Finally, sitting in front of the attorney I had carefully picked, I told him all that.
He said, “I’m just getting to know you, but the fact that you passed my own screening process and are sitting here tells me that he’s wrong.”
Later, my STBX’s attorney informed mine that he had gotten the same story and had figured out that it was all a fabrication, saying, “Besides, she picked you as her attorney, and you agreed to represent her.” That’s when I realized it was fortunate that the two attorneys were in their 60s and very familiar with each other.
“Elizabeth was a teacher. An educated woman who studied French and algebra. But her parents insisted she marry…. Turns out, she was an amazing public speaker, so good in fact that she traveled around the country and became a national celebrity. That work earned her enough money to support herself and her children.”
Imagine how much easier her life would have been if her parents had just minded their own business.
My very thought.
While the present day contains its own challenges, I am truly glad that my daughters (both young adults) are growing up now rather than at any time in the past.
LFTT
The more I read history, the more I’m convinced I wouldn’t have survived.
My ex did something similar after D-Day. For weeks, he went to Sunday services and systematically invited every participant to a lunch, in ones and twos, so he could spin the same story he also told friends and colleagues: that I was crazy, paranoid, making bizarre accusations and waving a gun around, so for their own safety they should not contact me. Only a few questioned why he would leave a young tween behind with a dangerous crazy person.
Ex met up with mutual friends (his friends first from college days) and let it slip that I said I had wished our daughter wasn’t born. What I really said was that this would have been so much easier if we hadn’t had a child. I found this out after meeting with them in the thick of this bullshit to say goodbye…they told me this is what he told them. Lord knows what other things he has spun or outright made up to others going forward. How does one explain that they see their child only every other weekend, having chosen to move a significant distance away? Or date a string of unwitting women and marry a second time, let alone propose to soon-to-be-wife-#3? I know it’s got to be something good, but I don’t want to know nor do I care what these people think. They love to spin their yarns of image management and reinvent themselves, don’t they? Anything to quiet/nullify your experience and make it a “you problem”…your own personal hell. Thank god I live in modern times and was able to leave a free woman, financially sound, with my child in tow. Thank god for this community, who understands the devastating reality.
Another move of note that has an eerie similarity to these institutionalize-your-wife times: Calling MY parents to tell them he was “worried” about me. Thank goodness my parents already knew what was happening and knew better.
Mine did this too. Except he tailored his story each time to whatever his listener would find most personally upsetting. They’d lost custody of their kids in their divorce? He said I was stopping him from seeing his kids. They took pride in their careers? He would say I refused to work. Their partner had had an affair? He said I’d cheated on them. And so on and so on, to dozens of people. Everyone I my circle and his. Very systematic. Calculated lies, always enhanced by great emotionality and crying.
I have a strong suspicion that this is the shit ex did. He was cold and calculating once he saw the writing on the wall. Telling his friends that I supposedly said I wished our infant daughter wasn’t born? They had their first baby a few months after we did.
Exactly, FW tried to spin that I was about to pull a Medea and one of our therapists bought it.
Strange then he’s fine with me having close to 100% custody?
GAWD bystanders are so so stupid
Right…you “can’t” see your kids or you’re worried about your kids and yet your ex spouse has custody? It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out who is full of shit.
Yeah, great point: not enough people ask that when abusers pathologize their victim-partners. If s/he’s so mad, bad and dangerous why in the world would you leave minor children in their care?
Yes, I did some reading on the history of divorce in the U.S. for a paper I wrote for a class. For a very long time, if you got divorced, the man got the kids, period. And since married women couldn’t own property, there was no property division. Some states made divorce so difficult that women would travel to other states, establish residency, and then get divorced there.
I have an aunt who divorced twice in the 1960s (both times for adultery), and she didn’t have her own credit cards and couldn’t borrow to cover her legal fees. The courts there hadn’t yet started making the guilty party pay the legal costs of the other person. So her mother and my parents loaned her the money for her attorney both times.
The current legal system is still full of problems when it comes to divorce and child custody, but it was way worse generations ago.
My paternal grandmother disappeared from the Puerto Rican census in 1938. My dad said she was locked in a room and fed through a hole in the door. My dad remembers her screaming out for help. Looking in Ancestry, I noted that 4 of her children died one after the other, all aged 3 and under, 1 during delivery, one soon after. My dad shared that she was ” taken away” and he, then a teenager, never saw his mother again. Replacing her was a girl, aged 19 to my grandfathers 40 + age who lived with my grandfather for several years and had babies too. I cannot find my grandmother’s grave and wad told that asylums buried their dead without notification or fanfare. There were more women after that, all common law.
When my first cheater Ex abandoned me right after delivery, I thought of my grandmother Magdalena. I have only one photo of her in her Victorian white dress, bow in her hair, bow on her gorgeous dress, hand on a chair..sly Mona Lisa smile on her face…before she married my grandfather…and I wept for her. When my #2 ex cheated and showed me his creepy character under the mask, I thought of my grandmother again. She had no voice, lost her 4 remaining children and lived I don’t know how long, locked away. I got to file, lock my raging cheater out, get a protection order and leave the house. This peace and joy now I am grateful for…to the woman who fought the system so I could live today so happily alone. God rest my grandmother and all the woman who lived in cells because they had a voice or grieved the losses of their lives. Thank you to the woman who refused to shut up.
What a tragic story about your paternal grandmother. Thank you for sharing this, yet another sad story of a woman who was denied her rights.
Heartbreaking but important history and I love your summary. xoxox
We have not gone around the world as we read of Suttee killings in Hindu beliefs, wives burned together with their dead husband to show her grief ( British rule tried to outlaw)
Islamic law of Honor killing..woman murdered beheaded or whatever method..for any cause deemed by the patriarchal system of bringing any shame on the family, including a big mouth. Fearless woman from time immemorial.
My sister-in-law wrote me numerous times that I should check myself into a psychiatric hospital. That she knew I was not able to handle my life. She had known even before FW told her. Unbelievable. I told this to my sister, and she said how they probably would have locked me up in a place like that not too long ago. Thank goodness for all that fought before us! And for CN and CL! And for my female lawyer!
My attorney was male, but a solid feminist. One of the reasons he got into family law in the 1970’s was because he saw so many women in rough spots that needed solid representation. He got started just as things were shifting to no-fault and said it was a huge step forward for women.
Great article and so relevant for certain cheating FWs. This happened to me.
After DDay, the FW kept focusing on my mental health and how “worried” he was about me. He said my response to the discoveries was out of whack because I wasn’t mentally stable. He kept suggesting that he was worried that I would suicide, despite me never saying that. He would call several times a day to say how worried he was- this despite me not interacting with him at all. One day he called and said that he had been thinking about “what to do with me”. He suggested a nice place down south that could help. I had no idea what he meant but he kept that up for a few days.
Fast forward a few weeks, I managed to open his emails and I found that he and Schmoopie had extensive correspondence about “what to do with me”. Apparently she was the expert on in patient mental health treatment and was suggesting nice places I could go- down south! I had to have other people read the emails because I couldn’t believe what I was
seeing.
I showed my therapist the emails too and she concluded that it was indeed the old technique of making the wife out to be crazy. I felt like I was in the 1800s. Luckily you can’t just throw women into asylums these days- but if you could, I would have been one of them. Very scary stuff. Very abusive and dangerous.
Actually, “down south” they could have had you “Baker Acted.” All fifty states allow for involuntary commitment but it’s extra easy in some states like FL.
Because everything is a for-profit neoliberal scam these days, it’s not as difficult as it should be to force children or even adults into involuntary psychiatric treatment. One of my very dear friends is a disability rights attorney in Florida and some of the stories she tells me are horrifying.
Yes, evidently the great writer Charles Dickens was of this ilk too. But there were good guys back then too, and her doctor said she was not insane.
Yes, Charles Dickens attempted to have his wife, Catherine, committed to a mental asylum after they separated in 1858, but the scheme failed because doctors found her to be sane. Letters published in 2019 reveal that Dickens tried to persuade a doctor to deem Catherine mentally unsound, possibly to avoid admitting his own infidelity or to rid himself of her. His plan was thwarted when the doctor, Thomas Harrington Tuke, refused to diagnose her as mentally ill.
Sorry I just saw the previous comment! I was so disappointed when I learned this.
I was even more disappointed to learn that my favorite “proto-feminist” Victorian author, Thomas Hardy, may have driven his first wife to a death of despair through his chronic infidelities.
At least Hardy had the perspicacity to regret it. He even dished out a little karmic comeuppance to his OWife by basically canonizing his late chumped wife and insisting that he be buried with her, not the OWife.
Not that this did any good for his dead chumped wife, mind you. Apparently after she died he found a draft of a book she’d written titled “Why I Hate My Husband” and Hardy destroyed it. He might have idealized her in the end but he wouldn’t let her have a voice.
In the terrible, lonely, unmoored time after I was abandoned, I came across Madeleine Albright’s autobiography and found something similar had happened to her! I was trying so hard to make sense of my experience. I also watched the movie Heartburn in those early days (also Marriage Story and first The War of the Roses). Then with mounting disbelief, I started to Google my favorite writers and found out that they had, almost without exception, cruelly ditched their wives. Also cheated. Like, all my most beloved male writers. It was shocking to me. It just wasn’t something it had occurred to me to ask until I went through it myself and went looking for answers. My question for CN is always, “how many?”. How prevalent is this pattern? I know from reading CL that it isn’t limited to the group I’m most familiar with writers and journalists.
I went through a whole big thing of questioning my literary and art icons due to revelations that so many were pieces of shit in their interpersonal lives.
The big conundrum I faced was the question of whether you can you really condemn the artistic contribution of an artist based on their interpersonal conduct. But then a very talented and insightful musician friend gave me a copy of Testimony, the autobiography of 20th century classical Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in which the author basically argues that sadists and fuckwits can’t really produce genuine art and only fake it.
I really can’t do this book justice in a blurb but it contained some of the most reassuring insights about the connection between true humanity (basic kindness and decency) and the creative process I’ve ever read. Basically the book concludes that cruel pieces of shit can’t be real artists but, through the creation of cults of personality and coercive abuse of power, they tend to spellbind naive followers into thinking they have any talent or anything important to say.
There’s been some controversy over whether Shostakovich really authored Testimony himself but the critics all appear to have political agendas so I tend to lean to my gut instinct that this autobiography is genuine.