Conservatives want a return to misogynistic, paternalistic laws | Opinion

• Difficult Situations."

“As the husband is the guardian of the wife, and bound to protect and maintain her, the law has given him a reasonable superiority and control over her person, and he may even put gentle restraints upon her liberty, if her conduct be such as to require it.” 

James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, 1827 

In the 19th century, a married woman could not vote, own property, keep her own income or engage in business. In most cases, she could not obtain a divorce.    

Once married, a woman and her husband were considered a single entity, with the husband being the one who made the decisions, held all the power and controlled every aspect of daily life, with one exception: the domestic sphere (e.g., cleaning, cooking, laundry, child-rearing and entertaining).  

A man could legally beat his wife into submission, publicly berate her and openly commit adultery without sanction. If all that failed to get her attention, an inconvenient wife could be summarily discarded at the nearest insane asylum.    

Laws regarding women’s rights varied minutely from state to state but were generally based on English common law and grounded in the paternalistic notion that women were childlike creatures incapable of thinking for themselves.     

Dismissed. Disregarded. And finally discarded. Especially after misogyny intersected with legislation in the 19th century, when women were labeled a nonentity under the law. They had no rights. As a result, insane asylums became the go-to spot for discarding inconvenient women.   

Whether it was a disgruntled husband seeking to free himself of an unwanted wife, a father hoping to rid himself of a spinster daughter or a son tired of caring for his elderly mother, 19th-century law was always on the side of the man. Women of all ages risked being summarily labeled insane and then forcibly committed to asylums with no way out until the husband/father/son said so.  

Surely the notion of the discarded woman is an archaic concept. Or is it? As conservatives gain control over the legislative and judicial permission slips that women need for such basic necessities as reproductive choices and pay equity, we are witnessing a disturbing shift in the legal landscape that hearkens back to a time of paternalism.   

Examining the history of psychiatry, feminist writer Elaine Showalter warns that “we can expect no progress when a male-dominated profession determines the concepts of normality and deviance that women perforce must accept.” Ditto regressive political ideology that threatens women’s rights. 

The basic structure of sexism has never been fully upended. Otherwise, the #MeToo movement would not have gained such traction. Nor would the backlash.   

In 1860, a well-educated wife and mother of six named Elizabeth Packard stood up during a church service that her husband, a Calvinist minister, was presiding over and did something so outrageous that it landed her in an asylum. Her offense? She had the audacity to disagree with her husband’s fire-and-brimstone sermon.   

As the result of her egregious behavior, Packard would spend the next three years of her life institutionalized at the Jackson Insane Asylum in Illinois. After her release, Packard spent the rest of her life writing books about the abuses she and others endured at the hands of their so-called caregivers. She also worked tirelessly to advocate for asylum reform, testifying before state legislatures about what she viewed as a basic human rights issue. Packard would eventually succeed in her efforts to change confinement laws, especially as they pertained to women.   

In her memoir, Packard writes that when she asked her husband why he was forcibly committing her to an asylum, her protector-turned-persecutor responded, “I am doing as the laws of Illinois allow me to do — you have no protector in law but myself, and I am protecting you now! It is for your good I’m doing this, I want to save your soul …  and I want to make you right.”  

Misogynistic laws sanctioned by a paternalistic culture allowed Theophilus Packard to have his wife declared insane and summarily institutionalized. It was not the first time a husband used the law to discard an unwanted wife. Nor would it be the last. 

The disturbing parallels between current legislation designed to erode women’s rights and the persecution that Elizabeth Packard and many other women endured during the 19th century suggests that malevolent misogyny is far from a thing of the past. Indeed, its emboldened resurgence is cause for both alarm and action.   

The discarded woman still walks among us. She is us. And she must be recognized.   To do any less is to capitulate to history and the patriarchy that defined the (mis)treatment of women.  

Shalynn Ford Womack, a Nashville-based freelance writer, holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology and is the author of "Ice on the Wing: Essays on Life and Other Difficult Situations."