But there was a problem. There was a blockage in the river, which would frustrate any attempts by these men to get to her by boat.
Elizabeth was on her own.
At the realization, she wobbled anxiously on the beam, her balance a debt she feared could not be paid. If she looked down, vertigo seized her, her head swimming with such swooning conviction that she could have been in the waters already. She heard the river rushing, its rising voice hungry for her, shouting out its greed.
For a long time, she merely sat there, struggling, out of reach both of human help and hope. But then Elizabeth sat up straighter. She reached a hand down to her feet. With focused purpose, she slipped off the shoes that had kept them prisoner, watched them tumbling into the rapids below. She wiggled her toes. Freedom. Now, she could stand up, straight on the beam, with her stocking feet free to take the path she had to take.
She had simply concluded that as the men could not help her, she would have to save herself. She had determined to rescue herself, “by my own unaided exertions, by going forward, risking all the hazards of a progressive movement.”18
She would not look down or back. Not once. That way lay madness.
She would look constantly upward instead, up at the clear blue sky, and trust her unencumbered stocking feet to lead her to safety.
When Elizabeth woke with a start in her bed in the dormitory, the vivid dream stayed with her.
She told Mrs. Hosmer about it. Her friend underlined its message with uncompromising clarity: “Mrs. Packard, you must leave public opinion behind you… You must just go on alone.”19
Alone. Unaided. Unaccompanied.
Elizabeth had never even imagined such a path.
But she wrote, “This period of subjection through which woman is passing, is developing her self-reliant character, by compelling her to defend herself.”20
“I must defend myself,” she realized, “or go undefended.”21
Because no one was coming to save her. She had to save herself.
And after all, what was stopping her? Was she afraid of public opinion? People already thought her mad. Was she afraid of losing something? She had already lost everything. “The worst that my enemies can do…they have done, and I fear them no more,” she wrote with increasing excitement. “I am now free to be true and honest…no opposition can overcome me.”22
She feared nothing now but God. She was not afraid of men. What did they mean to her? Once, she had thought of them as trees: strong shelters beneath which she could hide. But she wrote, “I can stand on my own feet, alone, now. I don’t have to be running around to find some tree to climb upon. I am a tree myself.”23
She felt it in her: new roots plunging deep into the earth, anchoring her to this unexpected path. She did not want to hide anymore; she wanted to be fearless and free. She would be the strong and steady one, feeling the wind howling freshly through her branches, seeing the world spread out before her as she grew. “I feel that I am born into a new element—freedom.”24 It was intoxicating.
“This Insane Asylum has been to me the gate to Heaven,”25 she later wrote—because it had brought her to this rebirth and to what she saw as her new divine mission. “For woman’s sake I suffer [here],” she scribbled in her journal. “I will try to continue to suffer on, patiently and uncomplainingly, confidently hoping that my case will lead [the] community to investigate for themselves, and see why it is, that so many sane women are thus persecuted.”26
Her new mindset changed her outlook on her entire life. “My will and desire is, and always has been, to stay with [my children],” she wrote, “to be with them, to care for them as my first great care. But God’s will has marked out a counter-line of conduct for the present, and my pliant heart has learned long since to say, ‘Father, not my will, but Thine be done.’”27 And she realized, anyway, “I am not childless. All God’s sons and daughters are my brothers and sisters.”28
In the December dark, she rose each day and kept up with her mission. The lack of light no longer bothered her. Because woman was moon, man was sun, and this was her time to shine.
“The fact is, it is dark times now,” she wrote, “so much like night that we cannot tell it from midnight… [But] night or darkness is woman’s time to rule, and we intend,” she concluded, and with due warning to those who stood against her, “to use our privilege well.”29
Her husband had tried to contain her—and failed.
McFarland had tried to tame her—and failed.