After reading Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls, I knew to jump at the chance offered by Net Galley to read an ARC of her new book The Woman They Could Not Silence. As she did in the earlier book, Kate Moore researched endlessly to get a factual presentation of a life that would not be believable if it had been fiction. Then she turned around and wrote a true story that reads like a compelling novel.
Running along as a background current behind Elizabeth Packard’s story as she begins in 1860 is American history before, during, and after the Civil War. Smart, independent, and a thinker, Elizabeth Packard becomes a threat to her husband. Because he can in this day and time, he has her committed to an insane asylum. He is a pastor. They have been married for twenty-one years. They have six children still at home. None of this matters.
Andrew McFarland, the director of the insane asylum, puts on a front of friendship to Elizabeth, even as she begins to see that more than one sane person has been assigned erroneously to his care. Many women have been placed there and labelled “crazy” because they failed to fall in line with whatever their husbands demanded. Conditions are deplorable and caregivers brutal.
Elizabeth, with unflagging spirit, comes to rely on her writing to cope. She finds creative places to hide her work for the time that will come when she can use it, not only for herself but for the other women she comes to care for. That time is slow in coming, but when it does, she is ready. Kate Moore’s absorbing narrative recounts a woman who refused to be silent, and eventually changed laws in state after state so that men could no longer confiscate property women brought into marriage, did not automatically get custody of any children in case of divorce, and could not label wives as “crazy” and send them to an asylum on a whim.
As the book pulls you in, be prepared for disbelief that this account could have happened only a century and a half ago, but then look at the extensive research Kate includes in her back matter.