Slaves of the Marriage Union On June 18, 1863, a woman named Elizabeth Packard rode out of a state insane asylum in Jacksonville, Ill., perched on the interwoven arms of two men. Three years earlier, she had been confined under a state law that allowed husbands and fathers to commit their wives or children to the asylum, with little legal process. All they needed was the permission of the asylum superintendent. Her husband, the minister Theophilus Packard, may have believed that his wife was insane, but the evidence was inconsistent. Her personality had evidently changed, and she became abnormally talkative and irritable. She wished to withdraw from his Presbyterian congregation and allegedly failed in her wifely duties: according to her sister-in-law's testimony, Mrs. Packard once failed to bake bread in the morning and instead served "biscuit" to dinner guests. On another occasion, she set a teacup down sharply and stalked out of the room when annoyed by her husband. We will never know Elizabeth Packard's true mental state or the details of her family life. Nevertheless, soon after being discharged, she convinced a jury of her sanity. Packard did not retreat into her former life; instead, she took up the cause of asylum reform, and became something of a national celebrity - a striking achievement when the country's attention was focused on the Civil War. She published an armload of books and crisscrossed the United States on a decades-long reform campaign. She fought for married women's rights and for freedom of speech, and militated against the power of insane asylums. In an era when common social ideals dictated that middle-class white women spend their lives in private, Packard reinvented herself as a public figure. She earned enough to support her children and, eventually, even her estranged husband. In fact, the timing of Packard's campaign, seemingly inauspicious, couldn't have been better. The war had created a temporary vacuum in women's rights activism. Women who had learned to organize politically as part of the abolitionist cause were rolling bandages and organizing medical support. They voluntarily put aside self-interest in order to support the Union cause, proving their worth by actions instead of words. But the delay was frustrating. Some feared the women's movement was stagnant, or forgotten. As a result, the former asylum patient Elizabeth Packard became a focal point for conversations about "woman's rights" and woman's wrongs. The 19th-century singular term "woman's rights," as opposed to the modern phrase "women's rights," reflected an undifferentiated concept of white middle-class womanhood. Moderate devotees of the Northern women's rights faction embraced her. Packard was savvy enough to weave her story into the other great issue confronting the nation, framing her experience as a kind of enslavement. She called herself one of many "slaves of the marriage union." In her mind, this was more than a convenient turn of phrase. Packard believed that her physical captivity, both in the asylum and at home, was a kind of marital slavery. Others agreed; her vivid story of oppression set up postwar debates over prioritizing African-American rights versus women's rights. Slavery had for some time been a favorite metaphor of anti-asylum campaigners, women's rights advocates and critics of the industrial labor system. The connections seemed natural to them. From the 1830s to the 1850s, at the height of the abolitionist movement in the United States, white female reformers began to recognize that they still lacked many of the rights they demanded for slaves. These activists linked their cause to abolitionists" fundamental belief in equality. "In striving to strike [the slave's] irons off," the Quaker activist Abby Kelley wrote, "we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves." Kelley was not alone. In fact, even before the Civil War, the training - and the frustrations - of working for abolition sparked the formation of a distinct women's rights movement. Tradition and prejudice meant the majority of male abolitionists did not accept women as leaders. By 1848, activist women's sense of exclusion inspired them to meet at Seneca Falls, N. Y., where they drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments" asserting that not only men, but also women, were "created equal." The document described the rights married women lacked: they lost the right to control their property, they could not sue or be sued, husbands could reinforce their control with physical punishment. Their list went on. Presaging Packard's campaign, the pre-eminent female abolitionist and women's rights organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that married women existed in a slave-like state, or worse. In 1854, Stanton complained to the New York Legislature that even though white women were "moral, virtuous and intelligent," even "equal to the proud white man himself," they were deprived of political rights just like "idiots, lunatics and negroes." These terms were standard language in the 19th century, even in medical texts. But the statement shows that like most Northern whites and many other abolitionists (including Abraham Lincoln), Stanton struggled to reconcile principles of equality, hierarchy, self-interest and residual racial prejudice. Both marriage and slavery were relationships of domination, but Stanton must have been aware that they were in no way equivalent. As one example, when a white woman was beaten to death by her husband, police and prosecutors generally labeled it an act of murder. Yet even though the premeditated killing of a slave was a crime, it was rarely investigated or punished. Despite such stark differences, women's rights advocates repeatedly compared slaves and married women - highlighting basic truths, but exaggerating reality for shocking effect. Prominent Southerners, too, saw parallels in the situations of slaves and women. The difference was that they believed, or claimed, that the subjugation of women and slaves was right and righteous. In a defense of slavery written less than a decade before the Civil War, the South Carolina intellectual Louisa McCord wrote fervently against the rising democratic sentiment of the age: "The man and woman are not equal ... The white and the negro are not equal; ... the philosopher and the idiot are not equal; the sage and the madman are not equal ... Some must rule and some must submit." McCord believed that hierarchy and domination were essential to the functioning of society. She apparently felt that her own privileged position made it worth living under a state of "bondage." The Southern slaveholder George Fitzhugh phrased it somewhat differently, but the general principle remained the same. Fitzhugh is most famous as the man who suggested white Northern wageworkers would be better off as slaves. More broadly, however, he enthusiastically endorsed a social system in which wealthy and powerful white men dominated all of "the weak," including "wives, apprentices, inmates of poor houses, idiots, lunatics, children, sailors, soldiers, and domestic slaves." In short, both slaveholders and abolitionists saw similarities among married women, the insane and slaves. Elizabeth Packard revisited these parallels when she tackled the inadequate lunacy law of Illinois. She borrowed the language of antislavery when she argued that her husband had attempted to "chain" her thoughts by holding her captive in a mental institution. In the midst of Civil War, Packard stated that a nation in the midst of freeing one sort of slave should do the same for others. If an evidently respectable and rational woman like Packard could be condemned as insane and shut away for years, it followed that any American woman might suffer dreadful wrongs under prevailing statutes. In a nation at war, other women's rights reformers risked seeming selfish when they compared themselves to slaves. Because of her particular suffering, however, Packard was at liberty to do so. She offered concrete proof that the law authorized a man to "kidnap" his wife, take away her children, and deprive her of personal liberty. Packard operated independently, and she was too traditional to believe that women should have the right to vote. However, she played a key role in the passage of an Illinois law that for the first time gave married women separate legal ownership of their wages. Her greater significance to the nation was the spectacle of her suffering, which raised public awareness regarding women's unequal treatment in law. Still, she was hardly a hero for the ages. Packard seemed oblivious to the racial prejudice she revealed when she said that white women had a more developed "moral and spiritual nature," were more attached to their children, and suffered greater "spiritual agony" than slaves. Indeed, after the war Packard and other racially chauvinist women's rights activists became one side of a boiling controversy over the fight to secure the vote for newly free African-Americans. During the war itself, both male and female activists had put the cause of women's rights on hold to fight the greater crime of slavery. After the war, however, divisions among reformers grew. The 13th and 14th Amendments had outlawed slavery, established birthright citizenship and promised equal protection of the law. But it was the heavily contested 15th Amendment that ruptured the awkward alliance between abolitionism and women's rights. The proposed amendment would make it illegal to deny voting rights due to "race, color or previous condition of servitude," and many women demanded that "sex" be added to this list. The majority of male and female reformers pragmatically threw their full support behind the 15th Amendment; like the prominent abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass - an avowed "woman's rights man" - they believed that ensuring African-American men's right to vote must be the first priority. But the suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dissented, feeling betrayed by the antislavery cause they had supported for decades. They believed it was women's turn. In that moment, Elizabeth Packard's story of marital enslavement and captivity in the Illinois state insane asylum provided a stirring example of oppressed womanhood. The struggle for women's rights gained momentum, and many white female reformers were fighting for themselves alone. And yet the two long-allied rights movements were weakened by the split. Sources: "Declaration of Sentiments"; "Proceedings of the American Equal Rights Association Convention"; Linda Carlisle, "Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight"; Frederick Douglass, "Why I Became a Woman's Rights Man"; George Fitzhugh, "Southern Thought Again"; Abby Kelley, "An Anti-Slavery Album..., 1834-1858"; Louisa McCord, "Charity Which Does Not Begin at Home" and "Slavery and Political Economy"; E.P.W. Packard, "Exposure on Board the Atlantic & Pacific Car of Emancipation for the Slaves of Old Columbia...Or, Christianity & Calvinism Compared, with an Appeal to the Government to Emancipate the Slaves of the Marriage Union" and "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"; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Address to the Legislature of New York." Kathryn Burns-Howard is a visiting assistant professor of history at Miami University of Ohio. She is writing a book on the 19th-century law of insanity, the family and the development of American individualism.