My case is now before you for action, and O, may God grant that your eyes may be opened to see…how many a sainted wife and mother has been ground down and trampled into the very dust… Can you not enact laws by which a married woman can stand on the same platform as a married man—as an American citizen?… Will you not, my Countrymen, recognize in every human being a brother or a sister, who has equal rights…with yourselves?25
Soon, as the book started its journey into the world, people would get to read those words, and the politicians would have a chance to respond. In the asylum, she’d told McFarland, “I am resolved to fight my way through all obstacles to victory—to the emancipation of married woman.”26
This book was round one.
Through her words, Elizabeth hoped to agitate and prompt, to start fires that would burn down the status quo. In short, “her page became a pulpit,”27 with the whole world her congregation, there for her to convince.
Yet there was a message in her book, too, for a much smaller audience. For six people who would likely never even see it: “To my beloved children is this book most affectionately dedicated.”28
But even within that dedication was a sign of things to come. For although it declared her love, it also suggested that Elizabeth had already risen from the ashes of her family.
“The mother has died!” she inscribed. “But she has risen again—the mother of her country.”29
Elizabeth Packard was a housewife no more. She had been born again: as a political campaigner.
“Women are made to fly and soar,” she wrote, “not to creep and crawl, as the haters of our sex want us to.”30
In May 1864, Elizabeth finally unfettered her wings.
PART SIX
SHE WILL RISE
Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story… The ability to tell your own story…is already a victory, already a revolt.
—Rebecca Solnit, 20141
Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words. Words trailing their streamers of judgment.
—Janet Fitch, 19992
CHAPTER 48
January 1867
Springfield, Illinois
With a gleam in her vibrant brown eyes, Elizabeth Packard, aged fifty, set her sights on the “house…upon a hill, that could not be hid”1 and approached it with a determination matching the property’s: she would be seen.
Uninvited guest or no.
Though her trademark determination was much as it had always been, a lot had changed for Elizabeth in the years since she’d published her first book. “I intend to write a book that the people can’t help buying,”2 she’d written in the asylum.
Elizabeth’s official author photograph, circa 1866
Within weeks of publication, it was apparent she had met her aim.
A second edition of The Exposure was on sale by June 18, 1864; by the end of the year, she reported having sold $3,000 （about $49,000） worth of books. Come January 1865, a further six thousand copies were in print in Boston, Massachusetts—and flying out the door. And Elizabeth had done it all herself, a one-woman publishing machine, handling production, distribution, sales, marketing, and more. Triumphantly, the newly minted businesswoman declared, “I am now independent!”3
She’d put her new financial wealth to good use to pursue those causes closest to her heart. In March 1866, she’d published a follow-up, Marital Power Exemplified, which more purely focused on married women’s rights. “Reforms succeed just in proportion as the need of them is apprehended by the public mind,”4 she wrote presciently. This book was intended to illuminate readers on the injustice of the current laws and enlist them to her cause. She’d been inspired by the bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had made the case for abolition. “My experience, although like ‘Uncle Tom’s’ an extreme case, shows how all married women are liable to suffer to the same extent I have.”5
This second book—a slim, navy volume bound with bronze ribbon—soon proved another hit; in one town alone, Elizabeth hand-sold five hundred copies at $1 （about $16.00） each. Her phenomenal success meant she had a solid “platform of ‘greenback independence’”6 from which she could launch her political campaigns.
Which explained why she was in Springfield, Illinois—the state capital—and on her way to the Governor’s Mansion.
At the top of the hill, Elizabeth paused, pulling her shawl more tightly around her to protect her from the bracing cold. She eyed the handsome redbrick building with admiration, though she was hardly alone in that; “many persons…paused upon the street to admire the spectacle.”7 Unlike these rubberneckers, however, Elizabeth soon swished her hoop skirts into her hand and boldly ascended the grand split staircase at the front of the house. Her physical elevation rather matched the journey she’d been on as a campaigner over the past few years: rising from ignorance to expertise, step by steady step.