The Woman They Could Not Silence Sparknotes

On May 15, 1869, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women’s Suffrage Association (National Women’s History Museum) . Before this, women were silenced unlike many other groups of people. Women who became too outspoken or sounded too intellectual for their state of being, were pronounced as mentally ill. Many of these women ended up in the same situation Elizabeth Packard does in the book The Woman They Could not Silence. As women fought for their rights for the next century, many stories like Packard’s were told and distributed amongst the population. Unjust institutionalization was not an uncommon phenomenon, just a silenced one. Over a century after Elizabeth Packard’s institutionalization, Susanna Kaysen was placed in

She was carried out of her house and put on a train because her husband, Theophilus Packard, had ordered her to be confined to an asylum since he believed she had gone insane. His reasoning behind this explanation was because she had become passionate about women’s rights and had begun to speak out about women’s suffrage. The common woman in the 1860s was very much for their husband. The man was the head of house and the woman stayed home with the children. Women who went against this ideal were obviously deranged. In the book, Moore writes, “Elizabeth had never felt so lonely.In this private room, she heard only her own breaths.” (p. 87). Packard’s humanity was stripped from her the moment she was taken from her home. She had left children and her passions behind against her will. Not only had Packard been subject to losing her humanity, but at the Illinois State Asylum she had succumbed to her own dehumanization in a variety of ways including, straitjackets, shackles, withholding food, etc. Elizabeth Packard was deemed insane and began a new torture outside of her present day. Kate Moore writes, “It is the artful Dr.’s policy to pronounce all the witnesses of these scenes of cruelty, as insane persons, hoping that this, his lying testimony in many cases, may outlaw them as witnesses against him, and his doings through his own attendants,” (p. 94). As Packard fought both physical and mental battles in the asylum, her caretakers became untrustworthy and sadistic. A patient who was only crazy because of hearsay was subject to dehumanizing and humiliating tactics that only made her spiral. Packard began to compare herself to other patients within the asylum to ensure that she wasn’t crazy. Kate Moore writes, “Mrs. Packard felt that she was being punished not for her behavior, but for her beliefs. She was not insane, she was not violent, she was not a danger to herself or others. She was simply a