Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard's Trial and Self-Defence from the Charge of Insanity. COMPARE TO OTHER COPY.
A Historic Indictment
Of The Mental Health System
[Mental illness]. Packard, Mrs. E.P.W. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial and Self-Defence from the Charge of Insanity. Or Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief, by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband, with an Appeal to the Government to so change the laws as to afford Legal Protection to Married Women. Hartford: Published by Case, Lockwood & Company, 1866.
8vo.; frontispiece portrait of Mrs. Packard; illustration facing frontispiece of “The House from which Mrs. Packard was kidnapped in Manteno, Kankakee County, Illinois”; pages occasionally foxed; brown printed wrappers; cloth slipcase; covers worn, rear wrapper chipped at bottom edge. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of a treatise by one of the first American women to protest the abuse of women under the mental health system. Elizabeth Packard’s chilling 138-page recitation of the ills visited upon her when she was institutionalized against her will was often reprinted, and copies of the later printings turn up now and again; this correct first edition, however, is genuinely scarce.
In 1860 Elizabeth Packard’s husband had her confined to a psychiatric hospital because she dared to engage in “free religious inquiry” (she insisted upon teaching her Bible students that human beings are born “good” and not “evil”). Packard’s husband—himself a clergyman—had her kidnapped and removed to an asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois, where Packard was held in isolation, deprived of contact with her children, not allowed to correspond with friends and family, and forbidden access to monies she had inherited. All of this was entirely conventional and in keeping with 19th-century American law.
After three long years of imprisonment (as she called it), Packard was granted the right to a sanity hearing and eventually won her freedom. She spent the rest of her life championing the cause of the insane and the rights of women, and was responsible for changing the commitment laws in several states.
Marital Power Exemplified... served as Packard’s opening salvo in her lifelong battle for women’s mental health rights. In it, Packard tells of her “three year’s imprisonment... by the arbitrary will of a husband” and appealed “to the government to so change the laws as to afford legal protection to married women.” Women’s struggles against the mental health system and its abuses became a main tenet of 1970s feminism and remain a vital issue until this day. Packard’s radical feminist mental health manifesto is treated at great length by Phyllis Chesler in her landmark 1972 study Women and Madness (NY: Doubleday; see pp. 5-6, 9-11, 12-13, 25, 103, 169, and 171).
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