Book Review: The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear
Author: Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing, June 2021, 560 pages
Genre: Women's History, Gender Studies
Plot:
A woman is committed to an insane asylum by her husband, but she fights for her freedom and the freedom of others unjustly confined to insane asylums, rights for confined patients.
Author's note:
The author notes that this book is not about mental health but about how mental health is used as a weapon, The dialogue is all nonfiction, coming from memoirs, letters, trial transcripts, diaries, or other records.Â
While higher rates of struggles with mental health are found in women, people of colour and disenfranchised groups, the author suggests that this is not caused by biology but by culture making a person powerless. This is a story about power and a woman who dared to fight back.Â
Portrayal of Religion:
Elizabeth Packard is a devout Christian who enjoys Bible study and theology discussions. The book takes place when many American Protestant churches divided over slavery and abolition. In the mid-1800s, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists all divided into separate denominations based on racial views.
Elizabeth Packard's husband was a pastor promoting Old School Presbyterian doctrines: Calvinism, predestination, and pro-slavery. Elizabeth Packard left her husband's church and joined a Methodist church. Throughout her story, she considers how to be a moral, godly woman and serve God, using her suffering to bring justice to help others.
Why I Chose It:
I like stories about strong women in history and how they overcame obstacles. I listened to the audiobook.
Personal Reflections
Thinking about what Elizabeth Packard could do when she appeared powerless made me wonder what I can do when I feel powerless. When have you felt powerless? In what ways have you been silenced?
Ignored by calling her insane
Elizabeth Packard said she was condemned of insanity for having her own thoughts. It was considered insane that she would have ideas different from her husband's.
Like Elizabeth Packard, I oppose:
the concept of original sin and treating everyone primarily as a sinner or criminal (many Christians oppose this Calvinist idea)
saying it is the person's sin that has caused them mental or emotional trauma
blaming the victim and offering spiritual solutions when the hurting person has physical needs
accusing someone of weakness for having self-doubt or imposter syndrome when it is likely society's marginalization that is making the individual question their self-worth
the idea that women are naturally meek, quiet, or submissive or men are natural leaders
the unequal freedoms afforded to women and men based on gender when the Bible shows endorses equality and that God shows no partiality (Complementarians suggest that the Bible endorses inequality and that God designed gender roles of male leader/female follower).
Deconstructing male hierarchy in the church is not new. Women were preaching about how the Bible calls for gender equality in the 1800s and before. In the 16th century, Katharina Zell and Argula Von Grumbach both taught that the Bible endorsed women preaching and teaching. When we see the historic teachings for gender equality, my ideas don't seem as revolutionary.
Can people ignore me by calling me crazy?
Ignored by calling her immoral
After Elizabeth Packard was proven to be sane, they continued to discount her ideas by promoting the idea that she was immoral, bad, or unChristian. My ideas on religion differ from evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. Can they ignore me by saying I support immorality or am unChristian?
Like the original orthodox and Catholic churches, I take the Genesis creation story as figurative and believe in a postmillennial peace rather than a premillennial rapture and tribulation. I reject the concept of a God-ordained gender hierarchy or favouritism for a heteronormative society.
My approach is to study the Bible passage's context, language, and culture so that I can understand its meaning and live accordingly. Some Christians say that since I don't take the plain reading of the text (through a traditional male lens), I don't have a high view of Scripture. They say that their opposition to LGBTQ+ is obedience to God and that my affirming stance is disobedient and shows I'm not following Christ. See my article: Who is a Christian?
Can people ignore me by calling me immoral, rebellious, and unChristian?
Confident in her Calling
While she was completely powerless, incarcerated in the asylum, she reproved Dr McFarland and told him that if he did not repent, she would expose his evil actions to all the world. It was laughable that a powerless prisoner would make such a claim to her captor. Though her threats seemed outlandish, she remained firmly confident that God called her to shine her light and work for justice and righteousness.
When I feel my writing is powerless, having no effect based on a lack of Amazon reviews, I feel my goal of changing the world seems outlandish or laughable. Am I insane to think that adding my voice can make a difference? However, like her, I feel confident God has called me to let my light shine, to be a voice for the silenced and sidelined, to write and speak about equality, gender, and the Bible.
Accomplishing her Call
When she was released, she fulfilled her threat and exposed Dr McFarland and the problems in the mental institution. Elizabeth Packard had a brilliant mind and steel courage. She was a prolific writer, an engaging speaker and an effective lobbyist motivating legal changes to free women from inequality. Kate Moore compares Elizabeth Packard's nonfiction writing to Harriet Beecher Stowe's fiction, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which motivated the public to free the slaves and recognize it as unbibilcal. I see my fiction as a way to motivate one person at a time to oppose a gender hierarchy and recognize it as unbiblical.
Kate Moore speaks about how Elizabeth Packard built on the abolitionist and gender equality speaking done by the Grimke sisters in the early 1800s.  I see Elizabeth Packard building on ideas from Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a female clergy who spoke out against the doctrine that unbaptized children were damned. We need to know the stories of these female leaders so that we can stand on their shoulders.
The McFarland Mental Health Center was renamed as a result of Moore's book. In 2023, residents of Springfield, Illinois launched a petition which drove the state of Illinois to rename its Jacksonville institution to the Elizabeth Packard Mental Health Centre.
Summary (Spoilers Ahead!)
1860: Convicted
Elizabeth Packard's husband has her kidnapped from her Illinois home and taken to the Jacksonville hospital for the insane.
Her friends could not get her released because it was perfectly legal for a husband to commit his wife to an insane asylum with two doctors' certificates.
She was committed for thinking her own thoughts. He put her away because she disagreed with him. She meets other married women who also seem sane. Their husbands have committed them for being jealous, assertive, studious, ambitious, or speaking out. Men called women insane if they acted unnatural for their definition of a woman. Unlike jail convicts, insane patients were detained indefinitely.
Elizabeth's Reproof of the Superintendent
As Elizabeth continued to claim she was sane, she wrote a reproof to the superintendent of the hospital, Dr Andrew McFarland. She threatened that she would publicly expose the evil and injustices in the asylum. She hoped he would repent and remedy the situation. Instead, he put her in a ward with violent patients and no sanitation. She witnessed attendants abusing patients and commented that the treatment of the patients did more to aggravate mental illness than to cure it. She begins to journal the abuses against the patients: using straight jackets, restraints holding the patient to the wall, isolation behind an iron screen, physical hitting and water torture. In other institutions at the time, female insanity was treated by an iron bridle (piercing the tongue to silence women). Since insanity was associated with the female reproductive organs, some institutions treated it by Clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoris), Hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), removal of ovaries, Douching (spraying various liquids up the vagina), or physically manipulating the angle of the ovaries.
"Human endurance is not made of Indian rubber."
Expert Claims Moral Insanity Requires No Visible Evidence
Dr. McFarland believed that Moral Insanity came in women who had high mental endowments, and that often a mental delusion or impairment had no outward display or evidence. He agreed to commit people with no visible exhibition of insanity. Moral perversities mean there is insanity in there even if you don't see it. He was confident Elizabeth Packard had a delusion because of her unnatural lack of feminine friendliness and her abnormal way of standing up to the doctor and his professional opinion. Other evidence of delusion included her morally perverse desire to live apart from her husband, her change from subservience to disobedience regarding her husband, and her lack of instinct to love her husband. Her aversion to her husband was baseless and illogical, without motive, and therefore proof that she was irrational and insane. Dr McFarland was adamant that he was right, that only an expert like himself could see the characteristics of insanity, and that eventually he would find the delusion causing the patient's insanity.Â
Elizabeth thought the process of treatment at the asylum would drive a sane person to insanity.
The Doctor as the Beloved
Dr McFarland's favoured form of treatment involved cutting off the patient from all friends and family. They were punished if they cried out or grieved for their children. He wanted to replace the patient's loved ones so that they would confide in him and he would discover their inner thoughts and delusions. He would lay his hands on the women and draw them close to him. Women testified this broke the bonds of propriety.
Elizabeth survived by making her life count, cleaning and caring for others, and speaking against oppressors. When McFarland gave her writing paper, Elizabeth was tricked into thinking he had repented of his former behaviour and she could trust him to publish the book she was writing. He had become her protector and defender.
When he delayed publishing it, she wrote a love letter, reminding him of their meeting of minds, offering a type of spiritual marriage. Dr. McFarland saw this as her ultimate mental delusion. His diagnosis was that she lived in a fantasy world and was driven by the power of insanity. He thought her ideas were so revolutionary that her own writing would prove her insanity. Her threats were laughable: no one would listen to an insane woman.
Be The Tree
Slowly, Elizabeth realizes that the men she had relied on as protectors and guardians had become her powerful persecutors. She had relied on a man to be the strong tree holding her in his branches. Now she realized she had to be the tree.
She realized she had to defend herself or go undefended. She had nothing to lose. She was free. She was reborn with a divine mission. She believed her suffering served a purpose: God was calling her to bring the community to investigate the persecution of so many sane women. God's children needed Elizabeth's help to be released. She was determined to follow the path God marked out before her. As the Civil War raged outside the asylum walls, Elizabeth wrote about how being a married woman compared to slavery and how unjust laws against married women needed to be abolished. She said, "I am resolved to fight my way through all obstacles to victory, to the emancipation of married woman.... To be God's chosen instrument to raise Woman to her proper position is a glorious office."
1863 Released as Incurable
After three years in the Jacksonville, Illinois, Insane Asylum, Elizabeth was released in 1863. When her eldest son was of age, he petitioned that his mother be released and she thought that was why she was released. She had asked to be released on her own recognizance and permitted to remain separate from her husband. However, Dr McFarland released her to the care and guardianship of her husband and wrote a certificate that declared her insane and incurable.
She was thrilled to be reunited with her six children. She continued to assert her own views, publicly decry her commitment to the asylum, and disobey her husband. He responded by locking her in a room of the house until he could arrange the necessary paperwork to commit he to an asylum again. While a husband was permitted to lock a woman in an asylum, he was not permitted to do so in the home. She secretes a letter to a friend, who arranges a trial for her.
1864 On Trial for Insanity
At last, she gets a public trial in Illinois to discuss whether or not she is sane. All men were entitled to this type of trial, but no married woman normally was tried. Their husband's word was believed.
Those supporting her husband give evidence of insanity that she does not demonstrate the natural womanly affection for her husband, is unnaturally outspoken, is not as submissive as she was when she was younger, has ideas and thoughts that do not come from her husband, especially she has religious ideas that do not fit with her husband's Calvinist and Old School Presbyterian doctrines. It was evidence of insanity that she left the Presbyterian church where her husband was pastor and attended the Methodist church which was in line with her thinking.Â
Her supporters said she was logical and rational, had a brilliant mind, and had been abused and treated unfairly by her husband and by the doctors who kept her in the insane asylum. They said she was passionate about religion and well-versed in various theology doctrines, but that disagreeing with her husband on theology did not make her insane.Â
The jury finds her not insane. Her opponents call it a sham trial. The accusations of her insanity plague her all her life. Her husband took the children to Massachusetts and refused to let her visit them.
Abandoned and Penniless
Elizabeth decided to publish her writing to earn funds. She used a small amount of money given by a friend to publish a short pamphlet that exposed the unfair treatment of patients in the asylum, especially the many married women incarcerated who were not in fact insane. She lobbied that each patient had a right to a trial before being declared insane.
1867 Her First Bill: Married Women Also Deserve a Trial
Illinois and Massachusetts passed a bill guaranteeing that all people accused of insanity, including married women, had the right to a public hearing. It also required that a trial be given to all current patients who had not had a trial (married women). It was the first bill Elizabeth had initiated that was passed, and it was a great victory. However, when all patients who had a sanity trial were declared insane, the public declared Elizabeth crazy for criticizing the institution and causing a lot of fuss and expense.
Investigation of the Asylum
Next, Elizabeth published a small pamphlet exposing Dr McFarland's part in the unfair treatment of asylum patients. Without funds to publish, she went door to door soliciting pre-orders for the book, essentially crowdfunding for it. This type of public solicitation was frowned upon as immoral.
The publication was a success and triggered an investigation into the Jacksonville, Illinois asylum. The investigation revealed that Dr. McFarland had released many sane patients just days before their sanity trials began. The investigators took eyewitness testimony of the horrors and tortures endured by patients, matching Elizabeth's testimony. The investigation called for Dr McFarland to be fired from his post as superintendent.
Asylum trustees stated that these reports were untrue and unreliable because they were from insane patients and disgruntled former employees. They dismissed Elizabeth Packard as both incurably insane and extremely immoral, given her love letter that seemed to propose marriage. They refused to fire Dr. McFarland, and he stayed on until new trustees were hired. Just before that, he left of his own free will and went to open a new, private mental health institution.
1869 Equal Property and Custody Rights
After Elizabeth Packard did further lobbying, speeches, and publications, the Illinois and Massachusetts legislatures passed laws allowing married women equal rights to property and custody of their children. Before that, the husband was almost invariably awarded custody of the children in the event of separation. This change resonated with me, because my husband had a female relative, Margaret Andrews (nee Weall) whose successful litigation against her estate trustees became an 1889 test case for UK married women's property rights. In my career as a financial advisor, I saw the importance of married women having their own credit and being named on family property.
Elizabeth Packard now had her own home and sufficient funds to care for her children, and her children supported her request for custody. By that time, the youngest of her six children was age 10 and the three eldest were already of the age of majority. She supported herself and her children with her writing and was happy not only to gain her own freedom but to secure the freedom of others.
Epilogue:
For 30 years after securing her freedom, she campaigned tirelessly and secured 34 bills in 44 legislatures in 24 states. Some of her greatest achievements:
married women had a right to a trial before being incarcerated as insane (this right was exercised by Mary Todd Lincoln in 1875)
independent bodies were required to inspect mental asylums
mental patients were secured postal rights and uncensored access to mail
Dr. McFarland's reputation remained impeccable, but Mrs Packard was attacked and dismissed as a female paranoic and half-cured lunatic. Her legacy became a mad woman who tried and failed to ruin Dr McFarland. Some historians denied her involvement in lobbying for the passing of political bills. She was largely unappreciated and unrecognized until after her death in 1897. However, though historians ignored or maligned her, she was never silenced.
"I am determined to write my own history. She left her own record behind to light the way to the truth. We should set our light blazing as an example to others and not set it under a bushel."
Postscript:
In an interview, Kate Moore states she "was inspired to write about the way that women for centuries have been silenced and undermined by this false claim that we're crazy when we're not."
In the book, the author gives several recent examples where the accusation of insanity is used to undermine a woman, and facts are dismissed as delusions.
Suffragettes in the 1900s were deemed to be suffering from hysteria.
Civil rights activists in the 1960s were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Martha Bell Mitchell, the 1972 Watergate whistleblower, was forcibly tranquillized by a psychiatrist after she exposed dirty politics.
Janice Dickenson, after accusing Bill Cosby of rape, was told dismissively that she was crazy.
Rose McGowan, determined to expose Harvey Weinstein's crimes found herself the target of a plot to make her seem unglued.
After Nancy Pelosi confronted Donald Trump in October 2019, he posted a photo of "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown" and stated that "she needs help fast.... She had a total meltdown in the White House.... Pray for her, she is a very sick person."
"What is an insane person's testimony worth? Nothing." - Elizabeth Packard.
Elaine Ricker Kelly Author is empowering women with historical fiction about women in the Bible and early church and Christian blogs about women in leadership, church history and doctrine. Her books include:
Forgotten Followers from Broken to Bold, Book 1 (2022)
The Sword A Fun Way to Engage in Healthy Debate on What the Bible Says About a Woman's Role (2023)
Because She Was Called:Â from Broken to Bold, Book 2, A Novel of the Early Church, imagines Mary Magdalene's trip to testify before the emperor (2024)
Walk with Mara on Her Healing Journey: 21 Steps to Emotional Resilience (2024)
Comentários