The private war of Mrs. Packard

by Barbara Sapinsley

Committed to an insane asylum by her husband, a Calvinist minister, for arguing questions of dogma, Mrs. Elizabeth Packard's life was transformed from a nineteenth-century wife to a crusading reformer and pioneer feminist. Her plight illustrated the insecurity with which married women lived in an era when husbands could declare wives insane and commit them at whim. Three years after her incarceration and after a dramatic trial she was declared sane. Abandoned and left destitute by her husband, Mrs. Packard poured her energies into reforming the laws that had so ill-treated her. She wrote books, gave lectures and traveled to thirty-one states, lobbying for legislative reforms and challenging psychiatric thinking. She was directly or indirectly responsible for legal changes that made it unlawful in the United States to institutionalize any person without judicial approval and brought about many changes in attitudes toward the mentally ill. By the time she died in 1897, Mrs. Packard had a