Nevertheless, she said nothing to him directly, enduring this “blighting, love strangling process silently, and for the most part uncomplainingly.”27
That is…until everything changed. In 1848, the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, unleashing a national conversation about the rights of women. It was one in which Elizabeth and, less willingly, Theophilus took part. “Wives are not mere things—they are a part of society,”28 Elizabeth began to argue, but Theophilus’s belief, according to his wife, was that “a woman has no rights that a man is bound to respect.”29
Countless times, the couple had “warm discussion[s]” on the subject. It was Elizabeth, naturally blessed with “a most rare command of language,”30 who triumphed in these fights. Yet her victories came at a cost. She felt the demonstration of her intellect prompted “jealousy…lest I outshine him.”31 Theophilus was “stung to the quick,”32 and his grievances slowly grew. He was the kind of man who counted them like pennies, recording slights in his diary with the miserly accuracy of a rich man unwilling to share his wealth. He grumbled crossly, “My wife was unfavorably affected by the tone of society, and zealously espoused almost all new notions and wild vagaries that came along.”33
Perhaps the notion that caused him most consternation: in Elizabeth’s words, “I, though a woman, have just as good a right to my opinion, as my husband has to his.”34
The concept was dazzling. “I have got a mind of my own,” she realized, “and a will, too, and I will think and act as I please.”35
Elizabeth’s newfound autonomy was anathema to Theophilus. “Wives, obey your husbands”36 became a scriptural passage oft quoted in their home. But Elizabeth was no longer silently listening. She felt that Theophilus might, “with equal justice, require me to subject my ability to breathe, to sneeze, or to cough, to his dictation, as to require the subjugation of my…rights to think and act as my own conscience dictates.”37 Defiantly, she kept on articulating her own thoughts, asserting her own self, inspired by the women’s rights movement that it was her right to do so.
Theophilus’s response was telling. He did not allow his wife agency. He did not encourage her independence. Instead, he wrote that he had “sad reason to fear his wife’s mind was getting out of order; she was becoming insane on the subject of woman’s rights.”38
On the morning of June 18, 1860, Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably in bed, her disquiet slowly intensifying. Beyond her bedroom window, the noise of the nearby prairie filtered through the closed green shutters. Elizabeth loved living in the Midwest. “Action is the vital element out here,” she wrote approvingly. “The prairie winds are always moving—no such thing as a dead calm day here.”39
By this point, that lack of calmness applied to the Packards’ marriage too, because their differences had only increased after the family moved west five years earlier. The change of scene had reflected Elizabeth’s literally widening horizons. Shelburne, Massachusetts, where the Packards had lived for most of their marriage, was a place dominated by mountains and trees: a landscape that spoke deafeningly of what had always been and always would be. In contrast, the open prairies and wide skies of the Midwest seemed to herald endless possibilities—what could be, not what had been. Elizabeth felt strongly that “woman’s mind ain’t a barren soil,”40 and once she was living in the fertile Midwest, she’d gotten busy planting seeds. “No man shall ever rule me,” she declared, “for I ain’t a brute, made without reason… I’m a human being, made with reason…to rule myself with.”41
She put that reason into practice. Soon, it wasn’t just her appetite for women’s rights that disturbed Theophilus. Elizabeth had a fiercely inquiring mind, and once she began to pull at the threads of their misogynistic society, the whole tapestry of their lives started to unravel. Both Packards were extremely devout, yet Elizabeth became wary of mindlessly swallowing what other people preached, including the sermons of her husband. Instead, she read widely about other faiths and philosophies until eventually her independent thinking led her to question her husband’s creed.
In fact, almost by nature, Elizabeth and Theophilus worshipped different gods. To Elizabeth, God was love. But to Theophilus, He was a distant tyrant who dispensed His mercy so sparingly and secretly that one never quite knew if one had done enough to be saved. Where Elizabeth saw good in all, Theophilus believed everyone was damned unless they found his God—and that included himself. The pastor, fearful God would find out the least sin in his naturally dark heart, “used to tell God what an awful bad man he was, in his family prayers.” Elizabeth commented wryly, “I was almost ashamed to think I had married such a devil, when I had so fondly hoped I had married a man.”42