The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“He paused when he saw her standing there, trapped inside by a plan of his own making. Would he beckon to her? Would she join him after all? On the contrary. He took time only to give her ‘one look of satisfied delight.’ ‘Never,’ Elizabeth wrote with tight hurt, ‘had I seen his face more radiant with joy.’ He threw her ‘kisses from the ends of his fingers,’ bowing his ‘happy adieu.’”

Elizabeth had difficulty accepting that she was going to be left at the “asylum” in Jacksonville, and initially, it appears that she allowed her husband some benefit of the doubt in allowing that perhaps he truly thought her “insane” but was terribly mistaken. This moment, when he looks up at her, staring down at him from the “asylum” window as he returns home without her, the cruel, mocking, triumphant nature of his expression and gestures is shocking to Elizabeth. She is experiencing in this moment a level of betrayal that she never anticipated, and this marks the beginning of her acknowledgment that her husband’s motives are not dictated by her best interests. His actions are motivated by vengeance and vindictiveness.

“Yet how else could she make it home? After all, she realized bleakly, ‘Being sane, I can’t be cured.’ But at this juncture, her friend McFarland stepped into the breach, calling up on her, as was his custom, ‘with the most polite attentions and marked respect.’ Once more, he promised her liberty—and he meant it wholeheartedly. She could well be ready to go home now, he said. There was just one condition. She would have to return to Theophilus—as his obedient wife. All she had to do to secure her freedom was submit.”

From the moment she enters the hospital, Elizabeth is focused on establishing her mental health so that she can be sent home. Being already “sane” is, in her case, a disadvantage because there is no possible room for improvement that would lead her doctor to suggest that she might become eligible for release. Early in their relationship, Elizabeth sees McFarland as possessing qualities her husband did not: gentile, charismatic, intellectual, warm, and respectful of her as a relative equal. She has no idea that McFarland is a habitual manipulator; she hopes that he is a rational person who will soon see that she is in the right. This suggestion that she should acquiesce to her husband’s wishes and forego all aspects of her personality and character that she hoped McFarland would admire is a significant discouragement for her.

“She knew if she went home now, nothing would be different. So she would not submit. […] But just because she wouldn’t obey, that didn’t mean she didn’t want to go home. She simply needed another strategy. As she gazed at Dr. McFarland in her room—so intelligent, so reasonable, so very sympathetic—she lit upon it. She would stay at the asylum, but of her own volition. She would stay weeks, even months if that was what it took. But she was going to give the doctor the chance to see the truth. She’d been placed here on a false charge of insanity. She didn’t need to be cured. She didn’t need to submit. She was just as sane as he was. She just needed to give McFarland a little more time to see it for himself.”

Elizabeth was desperate to be returned to her children, not only because of the emotional anguish she experienced by being apart from them but because she feared the life that awaited them if Theophilus continued to be their only influence. Her youngest four were impressionable and had intellectual and emotional needs she was sure Theophilus was too self-centered and detached to fill. It was a particular source of anguish for Elizabeth to assume, and correctly so, that her husband was doing his best to poison their minds and persuade them that their mother was sick. If she could convince McFarland and others in the psychiatric community of her mental health, she would be able to influence change at home and have objective proof on her side to restore her to her position in her community.

“One day, in late summer, she happened to be in McFarland’s office when she noticed a letter lying on his desk. She’d have known that handwriting anywhere; after all, she’d helped teach her son how to make those shapes. […] Smoothly, McFarland snatched it from her. […] When she demanded to know what it had said—for it had clearly already been opened—the doctor point blank refused to say. […] She thought she knew the doctor well, but she did not recognize this man. […] That web of words seemed treacherous now, each silver string laced with poison. An incontrovertible truth gleamed forth: ‘His word could no longer be trusted.’”

One of the greatest wounds to Elizabeth’s morale is that she does not hear from her children or from any of the dear friends who promised to help secure her release and vindication. Elizabeth was unaware that it was common practice among many “asylum” physicians and superintendents to withhold communication to and from their patients. Elizabeth’s relationship with McFarland eventually vacillated between love and admiration versus disgust and contempt. At this moment, although she understood the amount of control he wielded, she had not imagined that he was intentionally manipulative or insincere in his interactions with her. In this exchange, Elizabeth has been given a glimpse into his ability to manipulate his behavior and emotions to present himself as something other than he is, which gives credence to the rumors she has heard throughout the hospital.

“…she wanted to be released from the asylum as an independent woman. She asked him specifically not to consult her husband in the matter, which was highly irregular, if not downright illegal. […] ‘He has forced me from home as insane, when I am not insane. I shall not be guilty of the insane act of returning to such a protector.’ […] She’d given her husband four months to repent—four months to bring her back home. […] It was so angry, so unforgiving, so very unladylike. ‘Her hatred of her husband had something diabolical about it,’ McFarland later said, almost in abhorrent wonder. And although the intellectual impairment he’d sought was still absent, this was at least evidence of madness.”

In mid-19th century Victorian culture, a common set of expectations defined the parameters of gender-specific roles, particularly in a marriage. When Elizabeth gave evidence of her treatment by Theophilus, she asserted that it constituted a dereliction of marital duty on his part and that she was therefore justified in wishing to live independently. McFarland is incensed by her boldness; whether her arguments are sound is irrelevant to him. He is adjudicating her “sanity” based on how she fits expectations of womanhood on the presumption that ideals of feminine virtue must be expected to remain upheld regardless of how a woman was treated. McFarland’s growing hatred of Elizabeth is fueled by the insult he feels that a woman would dare call him to account for his decisions or presume to ask men to uphold the values that were supposed to complement and mirror that of women.

“[S]he decided, her duty was to focus on what she could do practically, in the here and now, to honor both God and her principles. Here, too, God had shown her the way to remedy her sorrows. Although Elizabeth had lost her privileges ‘in consequence of my defense of others’ rights,’ that was certainly no reason to stop her campaign to improve the patients’ conditions. If anything, it only emphasized her correctness of course.”

Elizabeth embraced and embodied her Christian faith with an unwavering depth and sincerity, even in hopeless situations. When she is thrown into the dangerous, unpredictable, frightening, and dehumanizing environment of Eighth Ward, she views her change in station within the framework of her religion, choosing not to dwell on the punitive message sent by McFarland. Instead, she focuses on her belief in God’s divine purpose for her, perceiving an opportunity to involve herself in Christian works. Although Moore doesn’t indicate that Elizabeth made this connection, when she begins washing the patients around her caked in filth, she mirrors the gesture of Jesus when he washed the feet of his disciples, one with which Elizabeth would have been very familiar as a student of the Bible. This act has been interpreted as an act of service by Jesus, and Elizabeth’s time in the psychiatric facility and afterward is characterized by how she serves others.

“Though she had at first been deemed fit for Seventh Ward, her subsequent rabble-rousing, spreading ‘discontent and disaffection’ everywhere she went, had made her position untenable. Her persuasive and impassioned interference in the lives of others was simply too great for McFarland to ignore, this was why she’d been moved. She may well have been mad in his mind, but she clearly had influence and eloquence—a fighting combination in the wrong woman’s hands.”

As Elizabeth was an educated, refined, middle-class married woman, the appropriate place for her was Seventh Ward. McFarland’s decision to move her to Eighth Ward was retaliatory in nature and an abuse of power, in response to her written declarations. In transferring her, he intended not only to terrorize her, debase her, and place her in physical danger but also to remind her that his power in the psychiatric facility was absolute and that her circumstances could always be rendered worse at his command. His outward justifications for why she had been relocated to such a seemingly inappropriate environment were based on the claim that her presence was upsetting and disruptive to the delicate women of Seventh Ward, an excuse meant to paint him as acting according to his paternalistic duty to his other patients.

“This Insane Asylum has been to me the gate to Heaven,’ she later wrote—because it had brought her this rebirth and to what she saw as her new divine mission. ‘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. […] My will and desire is, and has always been, to stay with [my children], she wrote […]. But God’s will has marked out a counter-line of conduct for the present…’”

Elizabeth’s confinement in Jacksonville began because her community outreach had so angered and alarmed Theophilus that he felt it necessary to find some way to silence her. While in the hospital, Elizabeth’s determination to speak out increased exponentially, along with the sphere of influence she was inspired to seek. In becoming aware of the plight of her fellow patients inside the hospital and presuming that others across the nation were likely suffering in similar circumstances, she found what she believed was her true purpose. Instead of intimidating her into compliance, Theophilus and McFarland made Elizabeth a greater enemy than they could have imagined because her mission was grounded in a moral obligation connected to her devoutness and sense of justice. Their actions forged the Tenacity, Perseverance, and Integrity as Weapons Against Injustice that would gain her allies and transform her into an activist.

“But such attempts to control her only increased Elizabeth’s desire to help. ‘I am becoming so extremely sensitive to wrong and abuse, that I cannot, or shall not, witness it without interference, even if you put me into fetters for it,’ she announced. When she’d first arrived at the asylum, Elizabeth’s shocked focus had been on those women she thought sane who’d been committed to the asylum and those travesties of justice. Now, however, she found her eyes opened to another field of battle—that of protecting the genuinely mentally ill from abuse.”

In moving Elizabeth from Seventh Ward to Eighth Ward, McFarland had broadened the scope of her understanding; she had never been exposed to such a filthy, hopeless, and dangerous environment, nor had she had occasion to interact with people who were debilitated by their mental health conditions. He had meant to use this transfer as a means of intimidating her into abandoning her written campaigns, hoping that the shock to her sensibilities would be enough to cause her to reconsider her position, but instead, he had provided her with ammunition in the form of eyewitness experience of his failure to perform his duties, even by the standards of his period.

“Some people later misconstrued her turning back to McFarland in the way she did. They saw it as an act of weakness, perhaps even a kind of syndrome, in which her captor became someone with whom she hoped to forge a positive relationship. Yet others—including women trapped in similar power dynamics—saw it very differently. […] ‘It’s a survival strategy.’”

When Elizabeth first came to Jacksonville, she was immediately enamored of McFarland because he appeared to entertain her ideas and opinions with genuine interest and respect. When Elizabeth began to suspect him of being other than he presented himself to be, and when her acts of defiant assertiveness through her writings broadened the ever-widening chasm between them, she declared him her enemy. Her decision to acquiesce and begin appealing to him while once again behaving according to his expectations of her was made out of necessity; while her faith and strength of conviction sustained her throughout most of her stay in Jacksonville, the conditions on Eighth Ward, compounded by her isolation from her children had begun to take a toll on her. Elizabeth knew that she could help neither herself nor any of her fellow patients from inside the hospital, so her cooperation was not a gesture of surrender but part of her acknowledgment of McFarland’s role as the only person who would truly help her.

“She called for better rights for women, the mentally ill, African Americans, and Native Americans. […] ‘Does our government think,’ she wrote, ‘that because it protects the inalienable rights of the men of America, it protects the rights of all? Are not women citizens? Are not their rights worth protecting?...I want it so fixed that any woman can run—on her own feet—straight to [the government] for help [via the law] the minute she wants help, to get out of the power of a cruel husband. You must credit her testimony as well as you do his…It isn’t fair for you to credit their lies—and discredit our truths!” She called male politicians ‘mean, and ungenerous, and unmanly’ not to have already protected women through the law.”

Moore emphasizes the relationship between Elizabeth’s time in Jacksonville and the breakout of the Civil War, which occurred while she was sequestered inside the “asylum’s” walls. Her awareness of the conflict permeated her writings; the abolition of enslavement was always a core tenet she refused to abandon in her theological perspective, and now the issue was being decided on a national scale. In the “asylum,” Elizabeth’s crusade for human rights expanded to include advocating for all people whose characteristics sorted them into social classes and categories habitually oppressed by those in power. Elizabeth asserted that anyone who believed in the Constitution of the United States should automatically support equal rights under the law for all people.

“She didn’t seem to see the irony that had he not treated her as he had in the past, she would have had no need to write her book at all. McFarland was both captor and liberator, but Elizabeth was seemingly dazzled by the dual roles. ‘As he had had almost omnipotent power to crush,’ she wrote, ‘so now had this same power to raise and defend me. The power of the husband, the power of the Trustees, the power of the State, had all been delegated to him. As to the power of protection, he was all in all to me now, and the spiritual freedom granted to me by this power was almost God-like.”

There is no evidence that Elizabeth ever consistently displayed any characteristics which could be legitimately attributed to mental illness from a 21st-century standpoint, and many physicians of her time who had the opportunity to interact with her publicly disagreed with McFarland’s assertions that she was “insane.” In one realm, however, Elizabeth did display a kind of confusion, naivete, and obliviousness with respect to how she perceived her circumstances. Everyone inside the secluded, insular world of the hospital operated entirely by McFarland’s leave and totally under his domain, and his strategic, calculating approach to patients and employees alike was an additional layer in his method of enforcing control. Elizabeth had seen what McFarland was capable of, but by the time he had permitted her to begin writing again, her memory had become slightly selective, and she was entangled in the complicated, inequitable web.

“‘This book is dearer to me than my reputation,’ she realized, ‘I felt willing, and do still, to lay down my life for my book.’ She saw she had only one thing left to offer him. She could give him her heart. Her heart for her book. ‘It is my last—my only hope,’ she wrote slowly. She regarded the trade ‘as an act of self-preservation, or a justifiable means of self-defense.’”

When Elizabeth decided to write her letter of romantic overture to McFarland, she had reached a critical point; she was willing to engage in the kind of manipulation McFarland employed every day, this time to serve the greater good. She did not realize that any future success of her book and how her message would be received would be almost entirely dependent on her reputation, and she failed to incorporate all of her prior knowledge of McFarland in her consideration of her actions. She accepted his word that he would publish the book despite the passage of time providing evidence to the contrary, and Moore does not indicate that Elizabeth ever considered he would keep her letter as evidence against her.

“So she asked to stay at the asylum while she finished her book, and McFarland consented. At this juncture, there is a curious divergence in their accounts. Elizabeth believed the decision made her a boarder rather than a patient at the hospital. Toffy, in keeping with his new responsibility, seemingly paid for Elizabeth to stay, and in this economic transaction, she perceived a change in her status. […] Yet the hospital’s records make no note of any such change.’”

One of the most frequently utilized tactics in the control that McFarland, and to a lesser extent Theophilus, employed in their attempts to control Elizabeth was through what they allowed her to believe, contrary to what was actually happening. Elizabeth developed a false sense of security when she began to think of herself as a boarder; the laws of Illinois had simply changed so that patients whose families could afford to subsidize their care were required to pay the hospital fees for their upkeep instead of providing services to all without cost irrespective of familial financial resources.

“And it was revenge. Because his decision to let her write was not only prompted by professional curiosity, hoping to discover the cause of her perceived illness. McFarland admitted: ‘As there will always be some, even of fair intelligence in other things, who will be led…to believe that she is not insane, I deemed it best to let her continue her strain of writing.’ He wanted her to write a book that would ‘convince the most incredulous’ she was mad. Because she was simply too convincing in asserting her sanity to others: too eloquent, too compelling. He needed a gun of his own to shoot her down. And Elizabeth herself, in McFarland’s view, had duly loaded it and put it straight into his hands.”

McFarland’s encouragement of Elizabeth’s writing had never been other than an attempt to encourage her to incriminate herself. One of his greatest frustrations with Elizabeth stemmed from her eloquence and ability to rationally present her ideas and opinions. He had become afraid that her characteristics of influence and sociability, which had so disrupted his “asylum’s” status quo among patients and staff alike, might find traction in the walls outside of Jacksonville. However, if he allowed her to continue adding to her already voluminous body of work, he felt confident he could discover and hone in on aspects of her arguments that he might use to discredit her, particularly if she managed to make her work available publicly.

“Though no longer resident in the asylum, she found its shadow stitched to her. She was still bound by the ties of her lost reputation, caged by the stigma of her supposedly lost mind. […] But without the project, what future did she have? The plan had always been to publish—to secure her liberty. Without it, she had no document of self-defense, no hope of saving her sisters, no way to point out to politicians the injustice of the current laws. Without it, Elizabeth could not safely return home and live happily ever after with her children—the thing she desired most intensely of all.”

The idea of freedom from the “asylum” meant nothing to Elizabeth unless she could use her time inside it to inspire social change and encourage legal reforms to rectify the injustices she witnessed there. Considered an “insane” person, Elizabeth needed to remain ever mindful of how she presented herself as she considered how to engage in the outreach that would define the remaining decades of her life. If she could convert her efforts into a livelihood, she would be able to sustain herself so that she might not ever have to sacrifice her beliefs in favor of meeting her basic needs for survival. Despite her many supporters, Theophilus still managed to see her confined to an “asylum”; she knew that she must develop a positive reputation on a grander scale to insulate her against falling back into the same circumstances that had oppressed her to begin with.

“And it was something Elizabeth had known that past November, when she’d stolen the house keys from her husband and buried them in the sodden earth beneath her bedroom window. She took them not to use them but to ensure he locked her up. ‘Thus was my imprisonment in my home secured,’ she wrote triumphantly, ‘whereby a writ of habeas corpus could be legally obtained.’ He had thought it was her he was imprisoning as he’d nailed shut her window and locked up her door. In fact, Theophilus had unwittingly boxed himself into a corner: hammering home the nails in his own coffin, dealing himself a fatal blow, sealing his own dire fate […].”

Throughout The Woman They Could Not Silence runs the current of suggestion that Elizabeth was smarter than her husband, and this orchestration of her permanent liberation from him provides an example supporting this idea. Theophilus’s behavior suggested that he was frustrated by her superior intellect, whether he would admit this to himself or not. Despite his status as a minister, his inability to debate her with sophistication on religious subjects was the catalyst for his anxious desire to sequester her in a place where her beliefs would not infiltrate his congregation. He underestimated the lengths she would go to return to her children; when she came home, she did so with a plan in place and, with her friends, set a trap that would ensnare him this time instead.

“‘She would not leave the church unless she was insane,’ replied Dole, as if pointing out a fact. ‘I am a member of the church,’ he added emphatically, ‘I believe the church is right.’ […]

‘Do you believe Mrs. Packard was insane, and is insane?’

‘I do,’ he said firmly. ‘I do not deem it proper for persons to investigate new doctrines or systems of theology.’

Yet Dole had earlier testified that he and Theophilus had become Presbyterians only eight years before.”

An ongoing theme of The Woman They Could Not Silence is hypocrisy, particularly evident in instances in which certain men take advantage of their positions of power to create and enforce rules intended to apply to others but not themselves. In his testimony against his sister-in-law Elizabeth, Dole, a man with no medical training and no credentials as a theologian, declares himself an arbiter of another person’s “sanity” based entirely on his personal opinions. The irony is that in becoming Methodist, Elizabeth sought to retain the values once held by their church, clinging to abolition when her husband steered the congregation in another direction. That it never entered Dole’s mind that he might be thought absurd to accuse someone else of being “insane” for doing exactly as he had done illustrates the pompous overconfidence held by many men of privilege of his era.

“‘On every topic I introduced,’ he said, almost in awe at her intellect, ‘she was perfectly familiar, and discussed them with an intelligence that at once showed she was possessed of a good education, and a strong and vigorous mind. I did not agree with her sentiment on many things,’ he conceded, ‘but I do not call people insane because they differ from me, nor from a majority, even, of people.’ […] ‘I pronounce her a sane woman, he said emphatically, ‘and wish we had a nation of such women.’”

In his testimony at her “insanity” trial, Alexander A. Duncanson, a learned theologian, stood up for Elizabeth as an intellectual and a scholar and complimented her as a person of extremely remarkable character and integrity. His words, the decision of the all-male jury, the refusal of physicians to declare her “insane” at Theophilus’s urging, the ongoing support of her friends, and the anger shown by the mob waiting for her husband after the trial emphasize that many men in the Victorian period, though not perhaps possessed of the same opinions characterizing what might be considered egalitarian thinking in the 21st century, were not the chauvinist, controlling, patronizing individuals that many of their peers had been. Through these actions, these men displayed the mid-19th^-century American virtues of protecting the innocent, defending and upholding justice, and policing their fellow men who failed to live up to standards of gentility.

“Yet she wasn’t motivated solely by the idea of exposing McFarland personally, as necessary as that was. She had a far more important reason to press ahead with publication. […] [S]he knew how lucky she was to be with [the Hanfords] and not in an asylum, where her days would have been punctuated by the ringing of the bell and the screams of her fellow patients. Despite all the dramas of the past few months, she hadn’t forgotten her sisters, nor the other women in asylums all across America.”

The Civil War was already well underway when Elizabeth’s newspaper reading privileges were restored at Jacksonville; she immediately immersed herself in the war news and rejoiced at President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Once outside the “asylum,” she retained the convictions she developed there; it was not enough for her to be free, there was relief to be felt in her liberation, but there could be no justice until those rights were extended and guaranteed to others. Her belief in the abolition of the institution of slavery had been passionately held, and she was inspired to create greater change by seeing the eradication of the practice become law.

“’I wonder that those who so implicitly believe her story,’ he wrote ‘do not ask themselves whether a woman who has been truly wronged ever goes to work in this fashion for remedy—is her course exactly a natural one? Should you, if persecuted by a husband, adopt that style of life, thinking to procure a vindication for yourself?’ Because wronged women were not supposed to stand up for themselves. Wronged women were not supposed to come out fighting, or be angry, or battle for injustice to be overturned. Elizabeth’s course was unnatural in his eyes—and therefore insane.”

McFarland’s primary criteria for adjudicating Elizabeth’s “sanity” were the parameters of virtue assigned to mid-19th-century middle-class American women. His comments are further evidence of the hypocrisy he demonstrated throughout his relationship with Elizabeth and his subsequent obsession with her activism. Elizabeth’s writing required her to speak about what she observed in his “asylum” because it was only through first-hand accounts that she could provide the evidence she hoped would inspire greater scrutiny of these state institutions on the part of the public. She had no other frame of reference; McFarland himself had placed her in a position to gather all of the evidence she was now presenting. In his mind, it was acceptable for him to seek out every sphere in which she might have influence and defame her as thoroughly as he could but “insane” for her to attest to what she had witnessed at Jacksonville and to assign ultimate responsibility to him as the superintendent.

“He took his leave of them feeling stunned. […] ‘I am more forcibly impressed with the injustice of their confinement by seeing them, than from the impression I had received from you. I have no hesitancy in saying these persons ought to be removed from that asylum.’ Nor was he the only visitor to feel that way.”

This gentleman was a member of a visiting committee allowed to investigate a state psychiatric facility in later years once Elizabeth had successfully campaigned for better oversight on the part of the public; he is not detracting from the power of Elizabeth’s persuasive writing by making this comment. Instead, he is sharing with her his impression that what he witnessed was so upsetting and shocking that a person would have difficulty fathoming the conditions inside some of these locations if they were not present to bear witness to it. The methods undertaken by many superintendents included involving concerned family members of patients as little as possible in their loved one’s existence inside an “asylum’s” walls; visits by trustees and others had once been carefully curtailed to reflect only parts of these psychiatric facilities deemed fit for public consumption. Elizabeth’s activism was intended to prevent totalitarians like McFarland from acting on the state’s behalf against the best interests of its citizens.

“She had asked him to consign it to flames. She had assumed he had respected her wishes. But the doctor had kept her promissory note for well over four years—even after she had left the asylum, even after she’d been found sane. […] When she could bring herself to look up, shock and scandalized disapproval were written all over the faces of everyone in the room.”

After all that McFarland had done to wound, silence, and discredit her, Elizabeth was still surprised when he produced her romantic note and used it to undermine the otherwise virtuous presence she cast in her interactions with those she hoped to enlist to her cause. Most of the people she interacted with in her work for social change were men, and it was easy for them to feel indignation and outrage on her behalf because the woman they knew was the epitome of grace, decorum, and propriety. Even those who considered themselves on her side were disappointed to learn that she had, in their minds, debased herself in asking for McFarland’s affection, even if they had some sense that her actions were undertaken in the interest of self-preservation. The contents of the note would follow her for the rest of her life.