Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard's Trial, and Self-Defence from the Charge of Insanity

In 1860, a wife was declared insane by her own husband, torn from her home, and locked away in an asylum. Her crime: daring to hold different religious beliefs than the man who claimed legal ownership over her body and mind. This is Elizabeth Packard's account of that nightmare, and her relentless fight to prove she was never mad at all. What begins as a simple conflict over Bible interpretation becomes a harrowing portrait of how marriage, medicine, and law colluded to silence a woman who refused to submit. Packard documents her forcible removal, her months of confinement among the truly disturbed, and her painstaking legal battle to reclaim her freedom and her name. This is not a comfortable read. It is a scream from the nineteenth century, preserved for those who need to understand what women lost under the doctrine of coverture, and what it cost to resist.