Instead, the patients gasped. Some cheered. Some were struck dumb.
By the total eclipse of the sun.
The moon, shining silver orb, special and solitary, moved in front of that burning ball of fire. The wind settled as she did. She blocked out all that usually dominated and made the world stop and stare. It was rarer than a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was a spectacle, eyewitnesses said, of “indescribable beauty, and one for which the mind was by no means prepared.”43
It all sounded rather like a woman named Elizabeth Packard.
And a woman like that could not be put back in her box—not now that she’d taken those giant strides outside it. Though Elizabeth had planned, upon regaining her children, to return forever to her domestic life—to a routine ruled by the whistle of the copper kettle and not by the schedules of the senate—that was not her destiny. She’d anticipated that her work outside the home would become “secondary…to those [duties] of maternity,”44 but she could not have been more wrong.
For we cannot help but be changed by our experiences, and she’d long ago broken the mold of what motherhood meant. Even if she’d wanted to step back into her small, safe sphere and for that sweet song of the kettle to score her days, it would have been impossible. That wasn’t who she was anymore. It would never have satisfied her.
She had unfinished business—out in the wide world.
So instead of maternity, she ultimately chose modernity. She would, she declared, dedicate her “undivided energies to the great work [of reformation], [which] I seem peculiarly capacitated by my experiences to perform.”45
She didn’t care that pursuing such a path left her open to more scandal and more cynical negative press. Knowing full well that public duels lay ahead, she didn’t hesitate. Society—and superintendents—could sneer all they wanted. Elizabeth Packard cared not a jot.
There was a world out there that needed reforming.
And she was determined to do it.
EPILOGUE
Elizabeth wrote in her asylum diary, “God grant, that the time may never wear away in me this spirit of resistance.”1
God granted her wish. Over the next three decades, she continued to campaign tirelessly, resisting any and all attempts to silence her. By her own reckoning, she secured the passage of thirty-four bills in forty-four legislatures across twenty-four states. She campaigned for women’s equal rights and for the rights of the mentally ill—the former, tellingly, usually a much harder sell than the latter. And she achieved widespread, long-lasting change, including, for example, the establishment of independent bodies that inspected asylums with the power to go above boards of trustees. Remarkably, in certain states, she was even successful in insisting that a female inspector be included.
Perhaps her most lasting achievement, inspired by her own suffering under McFarland’s censorship, was securing the postal rights of patients so they were guaranteed uncensored access to their mail. Her legal reforms were copied across numerous states, with the relevant bills often bearing her name; headlines marked the regular passing of “Packard’s Law.”2
Although superintendents complained that her reforms created a dangerous “feeling of independence”3 in patients, Elizabeth’s personal passion made her so persuasive that legislators couldn’t say no. “We passed the bill because we could not do otherwise, for Mrs. Packard was so very persistent, we could not bluff her off,”4 admitted one Massachusetts politician. Challenged on her tenacity, Elizabeth said simply, “Sir, I am pleading for those who have…no one to plead for them!”5
As the century progressed, however, she found she was no longer alone in fighting for her fellow patients. From the mid-1870s onward, the powerful hold that asylum superintendents had previously maintained on the realm of mental health began to slip. They found themselves under attack from other professionals, criticized for their scientific ignorance and “arrogant guardianship.”6
“You have far too long maintained the fiction that there is mysterious therapeutic influence to be found behind your walls and locked doors,” charged one physician. “We hold the reverse opinion and think your hospitals are never to be used save as a last resort.”7
In 1880, the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity was established to encourage patient-friendly legislation and meaningful oversight of asylums. Historians attribute its founding to agitations caused by campaigners, including Elizabeth, who got society so riled up that formal action became essential. The arguments Elizabeth had been making for years now began to be printed in respected medical journals, though of course she was never the mouthpiece.