She certainly felt that way. “What is very singular in my case [is that] this woman-crushing machinery works the wrong way,” she wrote joyfully. “The true woman shines brighter and brighter under the process, instead of being strangled.”46
So over the past sixteen months, she’d begun to break the rules more flagrantly. The secret journal had been only the start of it. Now appreciating McFarland’s censorship, she established an “Underground Express”47 to try to get mail out illicitly, relying on the daring assistance of attendants whose identities she never revealed for their own protection; it was expressly forbidden for staff to “assist in any clandestine correspondence.”48 Unfortunately, the Underground Express was a one-way system: Elizabeth received no replies, meaning she could never quite be certain her own letters had made it safely out.
She also chose overtly to help other patients, ghostwriting letters to their families as she articulately begged for their release. “Where woman is suffering injustice,” Elizabeth declared, “I claim a right to speak in her defence.”49
Yet to McFarland’s frustration, if he tried to clamp down on her activities—not all of which he knew about—his efforts to curtail her managed only to arouse sympathy for her from the staff. Before she’d taken her stand never to leave the ward, she’d once gone shopping with an attendant in Jacksonville, where she’d immediately broken the rules by buying herself some paper. Hearing of this, McFarland had searched her things and confiscated not only the paper but also the bits of pencil and old pens that he found. Yet the doctor’s heavy-handed actions “aroused the just indignation of the house”;50 consequently, his staff secretly snuck Elizabeth her stationery supplies.
Her hidden journal grew longer and more detailed by the day.
Even McFarland’s own wife seemed to side with her. Forty-four-year-old Annie McFarland, who in Elizabeth’s opinion “possessed more than a usual share of common-sense and common humanity,”51 had assumed the matronship of the hospital in late 1861. It was not unusual at the time for doctors’ wives to take such roles, given their family lived in-house. Having assumed this more powerful position, Annie deliberately sent comfort to Elizabeth in the form of little treats—a tumbler of jelly, a sugarloaf, an exotic taste of pineapple—and arranged for her to have a private room. In addition, other former privileges, such as the use of her trunk and private pitcher and mirror, were restored. Meanwhile, Celia Coe, the attendant who’d taught Elizabeth how to dance, had become the asylum’s cook and with Mrs. McFarland’s blessing brought Elizabeth “apples in abundance, and raisins, and oranges, and prunes.”52 It was a feast not only for the stomach but the heart.
It gave Elizabeth the appetite to challenge the doctor directly. “You know I am not, by any means, the only one you have thus taken in here, to please a cruel husband,” she would say. “It is fatally dangerous to live in Illinois, under such laws, as thus expose the personal liberty of married women. This [is a] kind of married slavery…and it must be abolished.”53
McFarland could have rolled his eyes at that: here she goes… He categorized Elizabeth’s political ambition as “a mission upon which [she is] driven with all the impelling power of insanity.”54 Even as he watched, she would become more excited.
“With resolution, firm and determined,” she would say, “I am resolved to fight my way through all obstacles to victory—to the emancipation of married woman.”55 She would stand up straight, all five feet one inch of her, as she said proudly, “To be God’s chosen instrument to raise woman to her proper position is a glorious office.”56
Yet to McFarland, her every word and action seemed a classic case of moral insanity. All this talk of reform and a divine mission…honestly. He saw not faith but fantasy.
Nevertheless, he watched her carefully—and with caution. Because she truly had “a disposition wantonly inclined to create the greatest amount of trouble possible to others,”57 and these empowering speeches she regularly gave had a habit of leaving all she spoke to rapt.
If only she wasn’t so persuasive. So damn compelling. She had, McFarland thought, a “more than lawyer-like ability to put her own case.”58 And in the only court available to her—his asylum—she seemed to have the jury of all its residents, sane and insane alike, in the palm of her hand.
Sitting at his desk in April 1862, McFarland paused in his letter to Mr. Packard. Then he pressed his pen to the paper and wrote with weary stoicism, “She gives us a world of trouble, which I only put up with under the thought, that she would give you, if possible, still more.”59