Elizabeth Packard Quotes

It had taken four years, but Elizabeth Packard had finally been given the insanity trial she had always wanted.

Wife,” he said hesitantly, “you will get out of the wagon yourself, won’t you? You won’t compel us to lift you out before such a large crowd?” Elizabeth smiled sweetly. “No, Mr. Packard,” she replied at once. “I shall not help myself into an Asylum. It is you who are putting me there. I do not go willingly… I shall let you show yourself to this crowd, just as you are.

Woman is too volatile and spiritual, a being to be kept down by mere brute force," she [Elizabeth Packard] wrote. "You can cage a bird and thus keep her down on a level with her serpent-mate, but just give her the use of her powers, its freedom, and she will rise.

Both Packards were extremely devout, yet Elizabeth became wary of mindlessly swallowing what other people preached,

Mr. Packard, I shall not,” Elizabeth said firmly. “It is your own chosen work you are doing. I shall not help you do it.

He asked her to stop attending the class. “I am willing to say to the class,” Elizabeth offered, “that as…Mr. Packard [has] expressed a wish that I withdraw my discussions…I do so, at [his] request.”54 But that wouldn’t do. That would only draw attention to her divergent views. “No,” Theophilus responded crossly. “You must tell them it is your choice to give them up.” Elizabeth exclaimed truthfully, “But, dear, it is not my choice!

I do not call people insane because they differ with me.

The Governor of Illinois steps up to make an announcement. “Today,” he says, “we are putting a spotlight on the real hero associated with this institution.” McFarland’s name is torn down. His gold-topped cane and portrait are removed from their prominent position. And on that August day, the governor announces that the hospital will henceforth be named, instead, for Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard.

Even before African Americans made up the literal majority of foundry workers such work was becoming understood as more “suited” to them, not just at the Rouge but in the array of foundry and metal pressing workplaces in and around Detroit. A Packard spokesperson described this phenomenon to an interviewer: “White and colored get along all right in the foundry because the average white worker doesn’t want a foundry job anyway. White foundry workers are foreigners.” A Ford official said, “Many of the Negroes are employed in the foundry and do work that nobody else would do.”40 As with the myth, specifically subscribed to at times by auto management, that Black workers had higher tolerance for hot and exhausting work, such a statement brings into being the truth it claims to describe—it is a perfect example of how racism becomes race-lore, an a priori assertion claiming to be based in observed and material reality.

Shelburne, Massachusetts, where the Packards had lived for most of their marriage, was a place dominated by mountains and trees: a landscape that spoke deafeningly of what had always been and always would be. In contrast, the open prairies and wide skies of the Midwest seemed to herald endless possibilities—what could be, not what had been. Elizabeth felt strongly that “woman’s mind ain’t a barren soil,”40 and once she was living in the fertile Midwest, she’d gotten busy planting seeds. “No man shall ever rule me,” she declared, “for I ain’t a brute, made without reason… I’m a human being, made with reason…to rule myself with.”41