This Week's Story
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Elizabeth Packard becomes a tenacious, effective crusader for women's legal rights and the mentally ill when their rights are often legally ignored.
This Week’s Story relives American history and the Bible through brief inspiring stories presented on mp3 audio recordings and text for reading.
You will not….! part two
Elizabeth sat up in bed. Words and people from her past were moving swiftly in her mind. She sat quietly, as though watching a movie.
“I am not having a nightmare. These are flashbacks from when I was institutionalized in 1860. Dr. McFarland said he found no mental disability in me, but he could not stop questioning. Was I sane? How could I argue with my husband Theophilus? Surely, I must be unnatural. He later thought my ideas about the Holy Spirit were proof that I was insane.
In the flashback she watched Theophilus talking at their family dinner table. She and the children were quietly eating. Theophilus stated, “Elizabeth, you will find it helpful, if you listen closely to what I am saying.”
“Theophilus, be assured. I hear you quoting one of your favorite Bible passages. ‘Wives, obey your husbands.’ I think what Jesus said about living in His love and obeying Him brings balance to obedience.”
“Elizabeth, you are too dazzled with your opinions.”
“Theophilus, please do not try to stop me from thinking. God has given you, our children, and myself freedom to think.”
Her flashback stopped. She lay down thinking of the letters she had written to the families of friends of hers who had been in an Illinois mental institution with her. She had informed them of the urgency that they rescue their loved ones. Some of her friends had been rescued.
She talked softly to herself. “I am a veteran of many life battles, certainly struggles. I am eighty years old!
“Toffy asked me, ‘Mother, do you wish you and Father had divorced, since the laws for being a married woman in the 1800’s did not provide you with many legal rights that single women had? Father was to be your protector. I know that he was not.’
“Toffy, your father was determined that I be put in the mental institution. He did not believe in legal divorce; neither did I.
“God, friends, my children, a surprising use of habeas corpus, a trial, public attention on my case, and your father’s loss of position, the sale of books and pamphlets, which I wrote, kept opening possibilities, and sometimes, doors of freedom. My determination was: Neither Theophilus or Dr. McFarland will keep me locked away from my children and freedom.”
“Mother, thank you for what you have accomplished. You have worked passionately and successfully for the passage of thirty-four bills in forty-four state legislatures. You have gained postal rights for patients so they could have uncensored mail in many mental health institutions. Inspection of mental health facilities by independent boards has become reality. You have worked for three decades to improve legal rights for women and the mentally ill. You have written powerful pamphlets and books that have awakened consciences in the United States.”
Elizabeth died at age 80, July 25, 1897. The newspaper Boston Transcript declared, “It has been claimed that no woman of her day, except possibly Harriet Beecher Stowe, exerted a wider influence in the interest of humanity.”
For people from her era to the present she left many influential books. Her children placed on her gravestone the word Mother.
Todd Warren, Carlos Gamez, and I, Barbara Steiner, appreciate sharing Elizabeth’s life with you.
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