Elisabeth Parsons Packard

Elizabeth Parsons Packard (född Ware)

1816 - 1897

Födelse: 28 dec 1816

 Ware, Hampshire Co., MA 

Giftermål: Gift med: Theophilus Packard 21 maj 1839

 South Deerfield, Massachusetts, USA 

Död: 25 jul 1897

 Chicago, Cook, Illinois, USA 

Familjemedlemmar

Make:

Theophilus Packard 1802 - 1885

Barn:

Theophilus Packard 1842 - 1902

Samuel Ware Packard 1847 - 1937

Elizabeth W Packard 1850 - ?

Arthur Dwight Packard 1858 - ?

ISAAC WARE PACKARD 1844 - 1927

Samuel Ware Packard 1847 - 1937

George Hastings Packard 1853 - 1886

http://www.myheritage.se/research/collection-1/myheritage-slakttrad...

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (28 December 1816 – 25 July 1897), also known as E.P.W. Packard, was an American advocate for the rights of women and people accused of insanity.[1][2][3][4][5] She was wrongfully confined by her husband, who claimed she was insane, for over 3 years. At her trial, a jury took seven minutes to find her not insane. She later founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, campaigning for divorced women to retain custody of their children.

Contents 1 Life 2 Packard v. Packard 3 Life after the trial 4 Literary uses 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links Life Elizabeth Packard, born in Ware, Massachusetts, was the oldest of three children and the only daughter of Samuel and Lucy Ware.[6][7] Samuel was a Congregational minister in the Connecticut Valley of the Ware Congregational Church from 1810 to 1826. She was able to get a quality education at the Amherst Female Seminary, where she studied French, algebra, and the new classics, thanks to the "adequate wealth" of her parents, leading her to become a well-educated and middle-class woman. Still, she first saw "visions" in 1836 and was soon hospitalized in a Worchester state hospital, but quickly recovered from the "disease."[6]

At the insistence of her parents, Elizabeth Parsons Ware married Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard, fourteen years her senior and said to be "cold and domineering," on 21 May 1839.[8][6][9] The couple had six children. They lived in Western Massachusetts until September 1854. At that time, the family then resided in Kankakee County, Illinois, and, for many years, appeared to have a peaceful and uneventful marriage.[8][6]

But Theophilus held quite decisive religious beliefs.[5][8] After many years of marriage, Elizabeth Packard outwardly questioned her husband's beliefs and began expressing opinions that were contrary to his.[10][6] While the main subject of their dispute was religion, the couple also disagreed on child rearing, family finances, and the issue of slavery, with Elizabeth defending John Brown which embarrassed Theophilus. She also worked as a teacher in Jacksonville, Illinois.[11]

When Illinois opened its first hospital for the mentally ill in 1851, the state legislature passed a law that within two years of its passage was amended to require a public hearing before a person could be committed against his or her will.[7] There was one exception, however: a husband could have his wife committed without either a public hearing or her consent. In 1860, Theophilus Packard judged that his wife was "slightly insane", a condition he attributed to "excessive application of body and mind."[12][8][7][6] 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.[11] Dr. 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.[13][14][15][16]

Elizabeth Packard spent the next three years at the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Jacksonville, IL (now the Jacksonville Developmental Center).[6][17][8][18][19] She was regularly questioned by her doctors but refused to agree that she was insane or to change her religious views. In June 1863, in part due to pressure from her children who wished her released, the doctors declared that she was incurable and discharged her.[12][7] Upon her discharge, Theophilus locked her in the nursery of their home and nailed the windows shut.[8][6] Elizabeth managed to drop a letter complaining of this treatment out the window, which was delivered to her friend Sarah Haslett. Sarah Haslett in turn delivered the letter to Judge Charles Starr, who issued a writ of habeas corpus ordering Theophilus to bring Elizabeth to his chambers to discuss the matter. After being presented with Theophilus' evidence, Judge Starr scheduled a jury trial to allow a legal determination of Elizabeth's sanity to take place.[20]

Packard v. Packard At the subsequent trial of Packard v. Packard,[21] which lasted five days, Theophilus' lawyers produced witnesses from his family who testified that Elizabeth had argued with her husband and tried to withdraw from his congregation.[6][22] These witnesses concurred with Theophilus that this was a sign of insanity.[12] The record from the Illinois State Hospital stating that Mrs Packard's condition was incurable was also entered into the court record.

Elizabeth's lawyers, Stephen Moore and John W. Orr, responded by calling witnesses from the neighborhood that knew the Packards but were not members of Theophilus' church. These witnesses testified they never saw Elizabeth exhibit any signs of insanity, while discussing religion or otherwise. The final witness was Dr. Duncanson, who was both a physician and a theologian. Dr. Duncanson had interviewed Elizabeth and he testified that while not necessarily in agreement with all her religious beliefs, arguing that "I do not call people insane because they differ with me. I pronounce her a sane woman and wish we had a nation of such women."[23]

The jury took only seven minutes to find in Elizabeth's favor. She was legally declared sane, and Judge Charles Starr, who had changed the trial from one about habeas corpus to one about sanity, issued an order that she should not be confined.[12][6][24][25] As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard described it, we will never know Elizabeth's "true mental state or the details of her family life."[12]

Life after the trial 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, and had taken her money, notes, wardrobe, and children and left the state.[6] She appealed to both the Supreme Court of Chicago and Boston, where her husband had taken her children, but had no legal recourse, as married women in these states at the time had no legal rights to their property or children (see Coverture). As such, the Anti-Insane Asylum Society was formed.[11]

With that, she did not go back to her former life, but became a national celebrity of sorts, publishing "an armload of books and crisscrossed the United States on a decades-long reform campaign," fighting not only for married women's rights and freedom of speech, but called out "the power of insane asylums."[12][6][18][19] She became what some scholars call "a publicist and lobbyist for better insanity laws." As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard has argued, Packard reinvented herself in this role, earning enough to support her children and even her estranged husband, whom she remained separated with for the rest of her life. Ultimately, moderate supporters of women's rights in the northern U.S. embraced her, weaving her story into arguments about slavery, framing her experience as a type of enslavement, even arguing in the midst of the Civil War that a county in the midst of freeing African-American slaves should do the same for others, whom suffered from abusive husbands.[12] Some argue that she seemed oblivious to her racial prejudice in arguing that white women had a "moral and spiritual nature" and suffered more "spiritual agony" than formerly enslaved African-Americans. Even so, others say that her story provided "a stirring example of oppressed womanhood" that others did not.[12]

Elizabeth petitioned the Illinois and Massachusetts legislatures, and in 1869 legislation was passed in those states allowing married women equal rights to property and custody of their children. Upon this being passed, her husband voluntarily ceded custody of their children back to Elizabeth, and her children came to live with her in Chicago.[26]

Elizabeth realized how narrow her legal victory had been. While she had escaped confinement, it was largely a measure of luck. The underlying social principles which had led to her confinement still existed. She founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society and 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).[27][6][28] In 1867, the State of Illinois passed a "Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty" which guaranteed all people accused of insanity, including wives, had the right to a public hearing.[7] She also saw similar laws passed in three other states.[8][29] Even so, she was strongly attacked by medical professionals and anonymous citizens, unlike others like Dorothea Dix, with her former doctor from the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, Dr. McFarland, privately calling her "a sort of Joan D'Arc in the matter of stirring up the personal prejudices." As such, Elizabeth's work on this front was "broadly unappreciated" while she was alive. She only received broader recognition starting in the 1930s by a well-known historian of mental illness, Albert Deutsch, and again in the 1960s from those whom were "attacking the medical model of insanity."[6][19]

She died on July 25, 1897. In her obituary, The Inter Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, described her as "the reformer of insane asylum methods."[30][8][7]

Literary uses Barbara Hambly refers to Elizabeth Packard in some detail in her 2005 novel on the insanity of Mary Todd Lincoln (The Emancipator's Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln.)[31]

Emily Mann wrote the play Mrs Packard, which premiered in May 2007. In Mann's play, Packard describes her life fully in the insane asylum; it is considered historically accurate.[32][10][14][5][33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Packard

Age 81 years. Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight by Linda V. Carlisle, published in 2010 by the University of Illinois, states her parents are Rev. Samuel Ware and Mary Tirrill Ware [Mary Tirrill was the mother of her husband, Theophilus Packard]. She was their fifth child and the first to survive infancy. According to Massachusetts Births and Christenings, 1639-1915, her parents were Rev. Samuel Ware and Lucy Ware. On May 21, 1839 as Elizabeth P. Ware, she married Theophilus Packard at Deerfield, Massachusetts.

San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, July 27, 1897 Death Of A Friend Of The Insane Mrs. Elizabeth P.W. Packard Passes Away in Chicago After a Trip From California Chicago, July 26. Mrs. Elizabeth P.W. Packard died at the Hahnemann Hospital this morning after an illness of several days. She had been in California three years visiting her son and returned to Chicago Tuesday. En route she was taken ill. After undergoing an operation, she died from intestinal paralysis.

Mrs. Packard was 81 years old. She married Theophilus Packard at Shelburne, Massachusetts in 1839. After twenty-one years of married life she was taken to the insane asylum at Jacksonville, Illinois, where she remained three years. Her mind being fully restored, she determined to devote the rest of her life to working for corrective legislation for the insane. While in the asylum she wrote Modern Persecution: Inane Asylum Invaded, Mystic Key and Great Drama, all along the same line.

Her first work for the insane was found in the law passed in this State allowing the insane to communicate by letter with friends and relatives and providing a trial jury for all insane persons before commitment to the asylum. These two laws she succeeded in having passed by forty-four States. She was also the author of thirty-two other bills in the interest of the insane. Mrs. Packard had lived in Chicago more than twenty years.

Samuel W. Packard, an attorney of Chicago, is a son. Theophilus Packard, another son, resides in Pasadena, California, where he is the pastor of the Congregational Church. Another son, Isaac Packard, resides in San Diego, California and still another son, Arthur Packard, lives in Avoca, Illinois; Mrs. H.G.C. Gordon of Pasadena is the only daughter.

Politics and Politicians A Remarkable Incident Illustrative of the progress of thought and to preserve the record of a most remarkable event in the history of this State, we give place to the following: In the year 1859 there was living in the town of Manteno, Kankakee County, the Rev. Theophilus Packard, who was the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in that village. His wife, Elizabeth P. W. Packard, was the daughter of Rev. Samuel Ware, also a Presbyterian clergyman, of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Mr. and Mrs. Packard were the parents of six children, all living at home. Up to this time it would appear that peace and harmony had always reigned in the Packard family. But in the winter of 1859 to 1860, Mrs. Packard became a member of the Bible Class of the church and being a lady of culture and education and of strong will, she soon found herself in conflict with other members of the class upon religious doctrines and this conflict at last developed between herself and her husband. It soon became apparent that a total change had taken place in her religious opinions and her husband became fully persuaded that her mind was diseased. At length two physicians from his church were called in, who, after a brief examination of her mental condition, gave their certificates that she was insane and on the morning of the 18th of June 1860, she was taken to the Hospital for the Insane at Jacksonville where she was confined for the space of three years. Her eldest son, Theophilus, upon attaining his majority, applied for her release and she was discharged as incurably insane. Upon reaching her home at Manteno, her husband still regarding her as insane, she was locked up in a room and kept a prisoner for several weeks. At length she discovered that a movement was on foot among the friends of her husband to have her removed to an asylum for the insane in Massachusetts, her native State. She managed to communicate with some friends in the neighborhood and requested them to undertake some legal means to protect her from her husband. Accordingly, legal proceedings were commenced by filing a petition before Judge Starr.

The case was on trial from January 11 to January 18, 1864. At 10 o'clock PM of that day the jury retired for consultation and after an absence of seven minutes, returned into Court.

The Court then ordered the Clerk to enter the following order: It is hereby ordered that Mrs. Elizabeth P.W. Packard be relieved from all restraint incompatible with her condition as a sane woman.

Mrs. Packard's subsequent career justified this verdict. In the winter of 1807 she visited the Illinois Legislature and succeeded in securing important legislation upon the subject of the treatment of the insane. One feature of the law was that no person should be confined in an asylum for the insane, except upon the verdict of a jury and this feature of the law remains to this day, although some efforts have been made to repeal it. Mrs. Packard subsequently visited other States and has been very successful in securing remedial legislation for this unhappy class of our fellow beings. She never lived with her husband afterward, but refused to apply for a divorce.

Rev. Mr. Packard is still living at Manteno, with relatives, enfeebled in body and mind. The affair here narrated destroyed his usefulness and ended his career as a pastor.

Mrs. Packard has written her experiences and published one or two books on subjects pertaining to insanity, which have had an extensive sale, whereby she has accumulated a fortune of several thousand dollars. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/43674883/elizabeth-parsons-packard