Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard

• Elizabeth Parsons Packard
• Born: December 28, 1816
• Died: July 25, 1897

Woman’s rights and mental hospital reformer, was born in Ware, Massachusetts, the only daughter and eldest of three children of Samuel Ware, a Congregational minister, and Lucy (Parsons) Ware, a woman with a history of mental illness. Her father saw to it that his children were well educated, and Betsy, as she was known to her family, received the best education that then was available for a girl. She attended a school in Conway, Massachusetts, and when her family moved to Amherst in 1826 she was enrolled in the local

female seminary. Raised in a religious household, she underwent a personal spiritual conversion in 1831, but later was to have doubts about its genuineness.

At the age of seventeen she began teaching in private high schools in the western part of the state. In 1836, however, she appeared to have serious emotional problems. Fearing that she might have inherited her mother’s mental illness, her father committed her to the state mental hospital in Worcester. The doctors found her to be a bright, attractive, vivacious girl. After two months she was released and certified as fully recovered from her illness.

In 1839 she became the wife of Theophilus Packard, a graduate of Amherst College who had been ordained a minister in 1828. He was fifteen years her senior. They settled in his native town of Shelbourne, Massachusetts, where Theophilus Packard became pastor of the local church. For the next fifteen years they lived quietly, raising five sons and one daughter. Packard managed her home, assisted her husband in the church’s Sunday school, and participated in church charitable activities. In 1854 they moved to Lyme, Ohio, for a year and then to Mount Pleasant, Iowa. It was during this period that Theophilus Packard began vehemently to object to his wife’s community work, and went as far as proclaiming her insane.

In the fall of 1857 the Packards moved to Manteno, Illinois. By this time Elizabeth Packard’s ideas became increasingly in conflict with her husband’s, particularly on religious ideology. She traveled to Lyons, New York, studying spiritualism under abolitionist Gerit Smith. By the time she returned home she had developed a mystical religious philosophy whose central tenet was that the Holy Ghost was female, and that she was its embodiment. This ran totally counter to her husband’s orthodox Calvinism. The differences of opinion between husband and wife were not confined to their home. In the spring of 1860 Packard began attending the church’s bible class; there she publicly expressed her religious views. In return her husband attacked her beliefs as heretical from the pulpit of his church. Their disagreements became so severe that in June 1860 Theophilus Packard had her confined to the state mental hospital for the curably insane at Jacksonville, Illinois. That state’s law allowed husbands to commit wives to asylums without their consent provided the head of the institution agreed; there were no procedural safeguards. The doctors, including the chief administrator, Andrew McFarland, found her strong-minded and intelligent, but were concerned by her belief that she was the Holy Ghost. For three years she remained in the hospital, refusing to return to her husband. But in the end they sent her back to him on the ground that she was incurably insane. Packard kept her from their children and sent her to live with relatives, but she returned, only to be locked up in their house while he arranged to have her committed to a hospital for the hopelessly insane. With the assistance of friends and neighbors a writ of habeus corpus was obtained, and a jury trial ordered to determine the state of her sanity.

The real issue of her trial was the personal autonomy of woman within marriage. Theophilus Packard had his wife committed for disagreeing with his religious views. Upon hearing the evidence to that effect, the jury found her fully competent after deliberating only seven minutes on January 18, 1864.

Free from the charge of insanity Packard returned home to discover that her husband had sold their possessions, moved with their children to Massachusetts, and left her destitute. He was legally entitled to do this for under Illinois state law married women had no property rights. From this time on she devoted herself to reforming the insanity laws and protecting married women’s rights. Elizabeth Packard turned to writing as the main forum for her reform campaign, publishing four books on these subjects between 1864 and 1868. One result of her work was an investigation by the Illinois State Legislature into mental asylums that proved her descriptions of foul conditions were true.

The sale of her books provided her with sufficient funds to settle in Chicago and to force her husband to give her custody of her minor children. For the rest of her life she actively worked for four objectives. First, for women to have complete control over their property. Largely due to her efforts Illinois passed its first married women’s property law in 1869. Second, to keep sane people out of mental institutions by improving committal procedures and tightening the definition of insanity. To this end she lobbied in numerous states, and her work directly resulted in changes in insanity laws in Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, and Iowa. Third, she wanted to see effective mental hospital administrators who would provide humane treatment for patients. Through her writings and lectures the public became aware of this need. Fourth, to make sure that patients were not cut off from the outside world, Packard wanted to protect mental patients’ postal rights. She even enlisted the support of President Ulysses S. Grant to achieve this end.

Packard died suddenly of a strangulated hernia at the age of eighty while on a trip to Chicago. She was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Chicago in the family plot. Her personal experiences had led her into the reform movements for the rights of the insane and the rights of married women, and in both areas her work helped to bring about changes.

Packard’s experiences and religious philosophy are contained in Christianity and Calvinism Compared: With An Appeal to the Government to Emancipate the Slaves of the Marriage Union (1864); Great Disclosure of Spiritual Wickedness!! In High Places: With an Appeal to Protect the Inalienable Rights of Married Women (1865); Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial; or, Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1866); The Prisoner’s Hidden Life (1868), reissued in 1873 as Modern Persecution; or, Insane Asylums Unveiled (1873); and The Mystic Key (1878).

There is no full-length biography of Elizabeth Packard. The best modern sketch can be found in Notable American Women (1971). See also M. S. Himelhock and A. H. Schaf-fer, “Elizabeth Packard: Nineteenth Century Crusader for the Rights of Mental Patients,” Journal of American Studies, December 1979; W. R. Dunton Jr., “Mrs. Packard and her Influence upon Laws for the Commitment of the Insane,” John Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, October 1907; “Further Note on Mrs. Packard,” ibid, July 1908; and R. Dewey, “The Jury Law for Commitment of the Insane in Illinois (1867-1893), and Mrs. E.P.W. Packard, Its Author,” American Journal of Insanity, January 1913. Obituaries appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Transcipt, July 28, 1897.