Have you not reason to fear that my case fairly represents a class of oppressed women, who have been unjustly imprisoned here, by unnatural men; who, because they had the power to oppress an unprotected wife, secretly rejoice in the aid which this institution furnishes them for doing it?… Will you not dare to do right, and…be our protector, instead of our husbands’ abettor in crime?3
McFarland likely sighed. Just as Mrs. Hosmer had divined, knowing the doctor of old, McFarland had become increasingly concerned about Elizabeth’s prayer circle of late, and these words about “a class of oppressed women”4 only added fuel to his flickering fire of unease. McFarland had given permission for Elizabeth to hold the meetings because he generally did support interaction between his patients, but there were certain circumstances in which it was not wise. “Excitements among them,” he wrote, “are to a degree contagious.”5 It seemed as if such a virus was now gripping the women of Seventh Ward. If Elizabeth had been planting seeds in the minds of others, as he now feared, it was not a harvest he wanted to reap.
Yet, as though the asylum favorite anticipated his concerns, she made sure in her defense to flatter the doctor too, appealing to his “understanding…conscience…and…heart.”6 He had a chance to be noble in this instance, she wrote, to “act honorably, manly, intelligently.”7 Would he step up?
“O, my friend,” she wrote warmly, “do not disappoint my high, very high expectations of you as a man—one who respects his conscience more than his popularity—one who dares to risk his reputation on doing right even in the face of a frowning world.”8
And Elizabeth knew the world would frown, because what she now proposed to the doctor was revolutionary: she wanted to be released from the asylum as an independent woman. She asked him specifically not to consult her husband in the matter, which was highly irregular, if not downright illegal. She told McFarland, “I am fully determined never to return to my husband again, of my own free-will.”9 By now, Elizabeth was motivated in that determination not by fear, but by reason: “He has forced me from home as insane, when I am not insane. I shall not be guilty of the insane act of returning to such a protector.”10
Instead, she planned a life free of him; she even asked McFarland for a job. Having spent the past four months acting almost as a matron, working unpaid as attendant, seamstress, and nurse, she considered herself competent and willing “to fill any post of usefulness you may offer me.”11 She simply wanted to “support myself, independent of aid from any quarter.”12
She did not think what she was asking for was so outrageous. After all, as she queried, tongue in cheek, “Am I under laws which compel those wives who cannot live with their husbands to spend their days in an insane asylum?”13 She promised that if he would grant her freedom, she would still want “the privilege of seeking you as my counselor and guide.”14
In her efforts to persuade him, she brought in her political perspective again, hoping to inspire him. “[Make] me an example of one who has dared to break the fetters of married servitude,” she urged, “chosing [sic] by far, a self-reliant position in society.”15 If he helped her, he could be regarded “as a Moses to lead forth a host of bond-women.”16
But that was exactly what McFarland didn’t want to do. One woman like Elizabeth Packard was bad enough; to have more like her would mean trouble indeed. Yet as he read through this section of Elizabeth’s defense, interest nevertheless sparked in his mind.
It was the way she wrote about her husband. She was far more candid than she’d ever been before.
As though she knew it, she defended her position: “I know these opinions respecting an husband may seem uncharitably severe… But, O, Dr. McFarland…these terrible opinions are supported by the most stubborn of all arguments—facts.”17 She’d reached her opinion of Theophilus, she said, from “no fancy sketch,”18 nor from “the pictures of an overheated imagination,”19 but simply from the way he’d treated her: as though she had no mind of her own.
To this point in her defense, Elizabeth had written with unimpeachable calmness. To this point in her stay at the asylum, she’d always spoken of Theophilus with the same sensible restraint. But four months is a long time for a woman to be withheld from the world, from her children, from her life. She’d given her husband four months to repent—four months to bring her back home.
He had not taken that chance.