She needed to lay out the reality of a woman’s position in society, to create a clarion call to arms for change, to present the necessity of immediate legislative change that would protect and not persecute women. “Reason taught me to be quiet while in the asylum,” she wrote, “[but] my pen shall rage if my tongue didn’t.”8 She’d kept her tongue from raging on purpose “so that my pen might [now] have a chance to.”9
The time had come, she decided, to let her feelings flow in ebony ink. She would stain the paper with her sentiments, silent and invisible no more. She would make her mark. This book would be a building block to a better world. It would allow her to stand upon it, yes, but she would also pull up womankind with her: a podium full of perfervid princesses, all ready to claim their prize.
Equality. Respect. Revolution.
Because who would speak for the howling women she heard at night if not her? Who would speak for the women of Seventh Ward, stitched into silence by the rules of the world, if not her? Who would speak for those women who’d tied their tongues even before reaching the asylum, cowed into submission by the very threat, if not her?
She sat up straighter, her mind not contained by the four walls of her ward but flying high over the land of the free, soaring past corn-filled fields and ascending over vistas of desert and mountain and trees. She saw a vision of a better future rising clearly on the horizon. She took a firmer hold of her pen. And she smiled, for she could not help “the most delightful feeling of satisfaction with my undertaking.”10
Pressing pen to paper, Elizabeth Packard began to write.
The words poured out of her. When she told McFarland of her vision, he beamed and urged her, “Write it out just as you see it.”11 He gave directions to the attendants to let no one disturb her. Hour after hour, she wrote in her room: the door closed, her mind open, her pen leaping from topic to topic with all the unfettered freedom of the wild rabbits in the grounds outside.
She wrote in a stream of consciousness. One moment, she was appealing directly to President Lincoln to emancipate women; the next, she was taking literary revenge on those who’d signed the petition against her in Manteno, warning that “their names will be left to blacken the pages of American history.”12 The scattershot approach allowed her readers—as she herself acknowledged—“only a ‘glance and a glimpse’ of the passing panorama of thoughts chasing after each other in seemingly promiscuous, wild confusion.”13 Yet the pent-up expression of almost twenty-five years was pouring out now and could not be dammed. Since she’d been sent to Eighth Ward, Elizabeth had had to make do with mere scraps on which to record her thoughts. An unlimited supply of paper, with unlimited freedom to write what she wished, almost literally went to her head. She was like a woman starved, cramming mouthful after mouthful to her hungry lips, little caring if what she tasted was savory or sweet, often eating both at the same time, simply desperate to sate her appetite and eat, eat, eat.
The hours blurred into days, and still Elizabeth kept writing. The book was by turns allegorical, biographical, reformative, informative—not “an ordinary book in the common style of language”14 and not logical either; “I leave the logic for my readers to supply.”15 She wrote on religion, on politics, on periods and lactating breasts. It was the story of her own life—a woman’s life—and she wrote with a brazen honesty that seemed fearlessly to defy the buttoned-up culture of her time.
Naturally, she wrote of what she’d seen in the asylum and appealed to politicians for succor: “Now we are knocking at your philanthropic heart to let us out of prison by unbolting the doors of your insane asylums and letting the oppressed go free. Free! Free!! Free!!! Oh! How I do want to be free!!”16
Yet through her book, Elizabeth felt she had found the key to her liberty, and not simply because it provided opportunity for self-defense. “I intend to write a book that the people can’t help buying,”17 she wrote assertively. With sales of such a book beneath her belt, she would finally be financially independent. “When I get my [book] printed, and circulated and sold,” she wrote, “[I will] pocket the money it brings me—to pay my fare home to Manteno.”18
Tellingly, the most detailed, loving, descriptive passages in the book were those about her children. Through her pen, she conjured them: her babies, playing on the floor of her cell, reaching out to her with chubby arms, their faces like photographs, so vivid she could almost touch them. She luxuriated in the most intimate details—colors, fabrics, sights, and smells—almost torturing herself to remember with exquisite intensity.