E. P. W. Packard

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (December 28, 1816 – July 25, 1897), also known as E.P.W. Packard, was an American advocate for the rights of women and people perceived to have insanity. She was wrongfully committed to an insane asylum by her husband, who claimed that she had been insane for more than three years. At her trial, however, a jury concluded that she was not insane after only seven minutes of deliberation. She later founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, campaigning for divorced women to retain custody of their children.

Life

Elizabeth Packard, born in Ware, Massachusetts, was the oldest of three children and the only daughter of Samuel and Lucy Ware. Samuel was a Congregational minister in the Connecticut Valley of the Ware Congregational Church from 1810 to 1826. She was educated at the Amherst Female Seminary, where she studied French, algebra, and the new classics, thanks to the "adequate wealth" of her parents. In 1835, at age 19, she was diagnosed with brain fever, a nineteenth-century term for an illness thought to be caused by a severe emotional upset. When the family physician failed to help her, Samuel Ware decided to admit her to Worcester State Hospital, with Dr. Samuel Woodard at the helm; he was highly regarded for patient care. On the admission papers, Samuel Ware wrote that she suffered from "mental labor" from her occupation as a teacher. She remained in the hospital for six weeks.

At the insistence of her parents, Ware married Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard, fourteen years her senior and said to be "cold and domineering", on May 21, 1839. The couple had six children: Theophilus (b. 1842), Ira Ware (b. 1844), Samuel Ware (b. 1847), Elizabeth Ware (b. 1850), George Hastings (b. 1853), and Arthur Dwight (b. 1858). They lived in Western Massachusetts until September 1854. Beginning in 1857, after having lived in Ohio and Iowa for short periods, the family moved to Manteno, Illinois, and appeared to have a peaceful and uneventful marriage.