Perhaps that was why, on February 8, Elizabeth Packard made an unexpected decision.
She filed for divorce.
Her petition accused Theophilus of “repeated and extreme cruelty,”25 including “using violence.”26 She cited his desertion and formally requested a dissolution of their marriage. When Theophilus received the writ, he still denied his wife her agency, blaming the “unhallowed influence”27 of her meddling friends for her decision to file suit.
But in fact, it was Elizabeth who’d started fighting back.
“I do say when we must fight,” she wrote, “go at it in good earnest.”28
She began pulling herself together. Though the obstacles before her had at first seemed insurmountable, she told herself, “Woman cannot be made to sink permanently.”29 She would rise again. And when she thought of what she had to gain at the end of her fight—her children and an independent life—“doubt, despondency and fear fled apace before the determined will and purpose to succeed.”30
Though she had to date been a woman solely operating in the domestic sphere, she realized that her current poverty must be “supplanted by plenty”31 if she was to stand any chance of winning custody or of standing on her own two feet. Just as she’d determined in the asylum, she now had to “become my own protector.”32 That simply could not be done by staying in the home. Unlike her husband, she refused to become a charity case—not when she had a brain and body able to earn wages.
Yet it wasn’t going to be easy. Though the Civil War had opened up employment opportunities for women, who took on roles in post offices, shops, and factories, even filling cartridge shells, it was a competitive market, in part thanks to the increase of war widows who now needed to support themselves. Women’s wages, already low, were driven down as a result. Seamstresses—a job for which Elizabeth was particularly well-suited—had seen their wages decline from 17.5 cents a shirt in 1861 to just 8 cents a shirt by 1864.33 They earned an average of $1.54 （about $25） a week, working a fourteen-hour day.34 Other positions were better paid, with Chicago saleswomen taking home an average of $7 （about $115） a week and factory forewomen $10 （about $160） a week,35 but with the cost of living rising all the time—to Elizabeth’s shock, sugar, a unit of which had once sold for 8 cents, was now retailing at 38 cents, while a unit of butter had jumped from 10 cents to 50 cents36—it was very difficult for women to eke out an independent existence.
In the end, however, she decided not to pursue any of these more traditional forms of employment. As she put it, “No talent can lie dormant.”37 And while Elizabeth was an exquisite seamstress, she was also a born writer.
It was time for that talent to shine.
McFarland’s recent intervention in the press had given her an idea. She went over to Sarah Haslett’s house and reclaimed her papers. She rifled through her things. She pulled out her old mirror and pried off its back.
They were still there: the documents she’d hidden back in 1860. She scanned her eyes across them. She’d written them so very long ago, but they were no less powerful for that. She decided she would publish one of these documents as a pamphlet: her reproof of Dr. McFarland.
She felt no compunction about exposing him. Hadn’t she warned him long ago: repentance or exposure? He had made his choice.
She was merely following through on her threat.
Yet she wasn’t motivated solely by the idea of exposing McFarland personally, as necessary as that was. She had a far more important reason to press ahead with publication. Although living with the elderly Hanfords was not the future she’d dreamed of, every day, she knew how lucky she was to be with them and not in an asylum, where her days would have been punctuated by the ringing of the bell and the screams of her fellow patients. Despite all the dramas of the past few months, she hadn’t forgotten her sisters, nor the other women in asylums all across America—“the many thousands who are still enduring the horrors of these inquisitions, from which the decision of this Court has delivered me.”38
“Knowing as I do,” she wrote in her newly penned introduction to the reproof, “their helpless, hopeless condition, so far as justice to them is concerned, I can find no sort of rest for my liberated soul, so long as my associates are not delivered, also.”39
She hoped her pamphlet might make a difference. She wanted to “enlighten the public mind into the true nature and character of our Insane Institutions”40 so that her countrymen might be motivated to “caus[e] their overthrow.”41 Elizabeth intended to shine a light on the issues so that others, more qualified, could then take up the fight.