June 17, 2019 • 30 mins
Elizabeth Packard’s marriage started out well, but soon, her questioning nature exploration of new ideas about religion led her husband to decide she was mentally ill. He had her forcibly committed to the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
When we talk about nineteenth century mental health reformers here
in the US, one of the first names that probably
(00:23):
comes to mind is Dorothea Dix. Dix was the superintendent
of army nurses for the Union during the Civil War,
and she spent decades advocating for state funded hospitals for
people with mental illnesses and for better treatment of people
in those hospitals as well as in prisons. Another reformer
who was living at the same time was Elizabeth parsons
(00:45):
Ware Packard, who actually met Dix at one point. Dix's
advocacy work started after she saw the conditions of the
East Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts, where she'd been
asked to teach a Sunday school class. Packard's started after
she was in balling terrily committed to an asylum based
on her husband's determination that she was in the language
(01:05):
of the time insane. Packard met Dix while hospitalized. We
are going to talk about Packard's story over the next
two episodes, and today the focus is really on Packard
and her husband and how their marriage progressed from one
that was apparently happy to one that was just crumbling
and ultimately abusive. UM. We don't talk as much about
(01:28):
the mental health treatment and mental health reform in today's
episode as we will next time, but some of the
language that comes up as nut language we would like
we wouldn't typically just describe a person as insane today
without other context, but like that is the word that
was commonly used in her writing and his writing and
(01:49):
in the conversation at the time. Elizabeth Packard was born
Elizabeth Parsons Where on December eighteen sixteen in where, Massachusetts.
She was the oldest surviving child field of the Reverend
Samuel Ware, who was a Congregationalist pastor. She also had
two younger brothers. The Wares were a middle class family,
and Elizabeth was given a classical education along with her brothers.
(02:12):
The family moved to Amherst in eighteen six and Elizabeth
went on to attend the Amherst Female Seminary. Female seminaries
where schools meant to provide women with the same higher
education that was available to men, so they were focused
on academics rather than being focused on becoming good homemakers
and wives. Part of Elizabeth's religious experience was the Calvinist
(02:36):
idea of conversion. Conversion is not, of course unique to Calvinism,
but Elizabeth's family and church community were Calvinists. Even if
a person had been baptized and attended church regularly, they
weren't considered truly a member until after experiencing a religious
conversion and publicly professing their faith. Elizabeth's conversion happened at
(02:56):
a revival in eighteen thirty one, but she really had
some doubt about it. Conversion was rooted in a sense
of public repentance and salvation from sin, but Elizabeth just
didn't think of herself as all that sinful, and her words,
she quote, always had been doing as well as I
knew how to do. She felt as though she had
repented for her sins as they happened, rather than waiting
(03:19):
for a conversion experience to do it. She feared that
her conversion was just something that was expected of her
and not something that she genuinely felt. This process of
thinking through her own religious experience in ways that contradicted
her religious community was something that she would do for
the rest of her life. Elizabeth became principle of Randolph
Academy in West Randolph, Massachusetts, after she finished her studies
(03:42):
at Amherst Female Seminary, but just after her nineteenth birthday,
her career was interrupted by what was described as brain fever.
This was kind of a catch all term for illnesses
with symptoms like a high fever, sensitivity to light and sound, headache,
and an excited or agitated mind. It might be applied
to real conditions like encephalitis, meningitis, and migraines, but it
(04:06):
was also a diagnosis given to supposedly over excited or
over exerted women. Elizabeth's family called in a doctor, but
she didn't improve right away, so on January eighteen thirty six,
her father had her admitted at the Worcester Hospital for
the Insane. According to her patient records, her father suspected
that the problem was that her corsets relaced too tightly,
(04:29):
and that her work as a teacher was causing quote
too much mental effort. Her doctor, Dr Samuel B. Woodward,
described Elizabeth as being calm at sometimes and mentally excited
at other times. He also said that she had sores
and a manorrhea or missed menstrual periods. He prescribed a
range of treatments, including epsom salts and tincture of opium
(04:51):
for her pain. He also gave her the Griffith's mixture,
which included mir and was used to treat clarosis a
k A green sickness, which we talked about in our
episode on the Green Children of Woolpits. That was one
of those diseases that, for some reason, only women got.
Within a few weeks. Though Elizabeth seemed to be well,
her doctor described her as quote at all times now
(05:13):
very pleasant, and he discharged her as cured on March
eighteenth of eighteen thirty six. Elizabeth's own opinion on all
this was that her condition had been caused by the
initial treatment that she was given for brain fever, and
that she simply improved with time. The whole experience didn't
leave her with a very good opinion of conventional medicine
or of asylums. She was also profoundly embarrassed by it
(05:36):
and angry at her father for taking her to an asylum.
In the nineteenth century, it was very easy for women
to be labeled as hysterical or insane, and once people
thought of you that way, that impression tended to stick.
It's not exactly a tendency that has vanished. Nope. If
people decide your shrill or hysterical, you still are no
(05:58):
matter how you behave Later, on May twenty one, eighteen
thirty nine, Elizabeth married the Afulist Packard, Jr. Of Shelburne, Massachusetts.
The awful List was born on February first, eighteen o two.
He was educated through tutors and schools, and through his
father's religious instruction. The Afulist Senior was a Congregationalist minister.
(06:19):
The younger Theophilist, spent some time as a teacher at
the age of fifteen, but he found that he did
not really have the patients for it. The Awfulist started
college when he was fifteen as well, although he was
chronically ill, so his studies were often interrupted by health issues.
Although his father was the pastor at a well established church,
the Awfulist was one of eight children, so money could
(06:40):
be tight, and at times the awful List had to
take a break from school so that the family could
afford tuition for his younger brother. Like his future wife,
the Offulist had some ambivalence about his own conversion. He
went to a series of revival meetings starting in eighteen nineteen,
but he never really felt the sense of conviction that
he needed you. He finally converted in eighteen twenty three
(07:02):
and started studying to become a minister like his father.
Unlike the elder Theophilist, he never finished a divinity degree,
but he did join his father as co pastor of
Shelburne Congregational Church in eighteen twenty eight. When the Apulist
married Elizabeth, he was thirty seven and she was twenty two.
Despite their age difference, they both had similar backgrounds. Both
(07:24):
their fathers were Congregationalist ministers. They were both educated and
well read, They both opposed slavery, and they both wanted
to start a family. There wasn't really a love match,
though their temperaments were very different. Elizabeth was lively and
a little unconventional, and Theophilist was very sober and reserved.
(07:45):
And their journals and their writings about their early married life,
Elizabeth proudly and sometimes effusively talked about their home and
their children and the clothes that she made for them,
and she did it in a very personal way. The Aphilis,
on the other hand, was very practical and analytic goal
and he detailed things like the fact that he got
married and their household expenses and all these other Monday
(08:05):
matters without a lot of emotion involved. Elizabeth had lots
of suitors who were closer to her age, and she
seems to have married the Apulist mostly to please her father.
The two men were longtime associates, and Theophilist had known
her since she was ten years old. The awful List,
for his part, seems to have married her because he
was an established pastor and it was simply time for
(08:27):
him to have a wife. In spite of all these differences,
though for the next fifteen years, their relationship seems to
have been fine. They were financially comfortable, with a nice
house on six acres of land with an orchard. Elizabeth
filled the role of a minister's wife well, helping out
in the community and teaching Sunday school and generally being
an upstanding example. She was a good housekeeper and a
(08:50):
good host when other ministers visited them. They had a
child every two or three years. Another Theophilist, born in
eighteen forty two, Isaac known as Ira in eighteen forty four,
Samuel in eighteen forty seven, Elizabeth known as Libby in
eighteen fifty and George in eighteen fifty three. These were
both devoted parents, with Elizabeth raising the children and Theophilist
(09:13):
seeing to their religious instruction, and their life suddenly changed
in December of eighteen fifty three. And we'll get into
that after we first paused for a sponsor break. In
December of eighteen fifty three, the Afilist Packer Jr. Abruptly
(09:33):
resigned as co pastor of his Congregationalist church in Shelburne, Massachusetts.
The congregation tried to get him to stay, since his
father was in his eighties. By this point, it was
clear that the church was going to need entirely new
leadership if the younger Theophilist left. He refused to stay, though,
and the family packed up to move west. Neither the
(09:54):
Afilist nor Elizabeth really documented their reasons for his resignation
or their move, but there are several probable contributing factors.
The awful List may have thought a move would be
good for his health. He continued to have chronic illnesses
throughout his life. He had also always had some interest
in doing missionary work, which he might pursue out west,
(10:14):
and Elizabeth was excited about the idea of a new
adventure and a change of scenery. Apart from that, though,
the religious environment of New England was changing. The Presbyterian Church,
which had a lot of connections to the Congregationalist, was
in the middle of a schism between the Old School
and the New School. The Old School preferred very strict
(10:35):
traditional Calvinism, while the New School wanted to revise various
parts of the doctrine and was influenced by the revivalism
of the second Grade Awakening. The Awful Lists firmly belonged
to the Old School, while a lot of New England's
Presbyterians were beginning to favor the New School. Calvinism in
general was also starting to fall out of favor, with Unitarian, Methodist,
(10:57):
and Baptist churches becoming more popular. The Awful seems to
have thought that if he went west, away from all
these new influences, he might be able to establish a
church that was more in line with his traditional Calvinist views.
It also meant that he could get his wife away
from what he regarded as the corrupting influence of all
these new denominations and unconventional doctrines. She was becoming interested
(11:20):
in Transcendentalism and had started learning about Unitarianism, something that
the awful Is really wanted to discourage, not just for
her but also for how she raised their children. After
they went west, they spent a few years living in
parts of Ohio and Iowa, moving every year or two.
The Offulist was immediately dissatisfied, though he learned really quickly
(11:42):
that a lot of people had moved west to get
away from religious conservatism, and so he did not suddenly
find himself with a thriving congregation of people to lead
who really wanted to be in like a really old
school conservative Calvinist church. People were also suspicious of him,
especially because he was a Northerner, and a lot of
(12:02):
people who had migrated to the areas where they were
living hailed from the south. Plus, Elizabeth discovered that she
loved being away from New England's very strict social expectations.
She could be more relaxed in her clothes and her demeanor,
and she relished all the new ideas and experiences that
she was discovering. She wrote, quote, our New England habits
(12:22):
have been broken up. Our mold in which we were
cast has been broken up. We have had room for
expansive growth. We were too conservative rutt thinkers there. She
was obviously very happy about this, But the Offulis's assessment
of all of this was that his wife was quote
unfavorably affected by the tone of society and zealously espoused
(12:44):
almost all new notions and wild vagaries that came along.
So the Apulist had moved west with the hope of
establishing a conservative church and distancing his wife from all
these new modes of religious and spiritual thought, and instead
the opposite was happening. She made friends with phrenologists, and
she invited Unitarian ministers to stay with them, and she
(13:05):
started adopting spiritualist beliefs. Soon their marriage was really starting
to show some strain. Elizabeth wanted, in her words, a
manly man who would love her and support her. She
increasingly followed the idea known as new womanhood, that a
woman should be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive, with the
household and the child rearing matters falling under her sphere
(13:28):
of influence. The Awfulist, on the other hand, thought his
authority was the foundation of their marriage and that Elizabeth
should submit to it in all things. He was fine
with her making decisions about the home and the children
as long as they were the same as what he
wanted her to do. Elizabeth was also aware of the
growing movement for women's rights, and she found other like
(13:51):
minded people wherever she lived. They encouraged her to stand
up for herself and make her opinions known to her husband.
She did more and more missionary work out in the community,
even though her husband thought she was neglecting their home
to do it. The afu List was frustrated and dismayed
by this sudden, to his mind, lack of obedience and
femininity in his wife. On top of all that, the
(14:13):
family started having financial trouble thanks to their series of
relocations and remodeling the houses that they moved into, and
the fact that their congregations were just a lot smaller
and less affluent than they had been back east. Eventually,
the Packards moved to Mantino, Illinois, where Theophilist's sister lived
with her husband, A Bija Dole. The off List became
(14:34):
pastor at Mantino's first Presbyterian church. Very shortly after the move,
before they were really even settled in, Elizabeth went to
New York with their two youngest children to visit family.
At this point, Elizabeth seems to have really genuinely needed
a break. After all this moving around and financial troubles
and her increasingly contentious marriage. She was trying to maintain
(14:55):
a home and take care of five children without a
lot of help. She was increasingly frustrated by her husband's
lack of support for her and her opinions, and he
had started to imply to her that he didn't think
she was in her right mind, and the fact that
he was saying this to her really frightened and upset her.
Elizabeth described herself as being at her breaking point. She
(15:17):
wrote that she was quote seeking what my soul needed
but could not find at home the love and sympathy
of friends. But when she got to New York, she
learned that her husband had written to her family ahead
of her trip and told them that he thought she was,
in the language of the day, insane. In New York,
Elizabeth spent a lot of time with women's rights activists
(15:37):
and spiritualists. She went to several seances, and at one
of them, a medium gave her a message from her
late mother, Lucy Strong Parsons where who told her to
prepare for persecution. In addition to her belief and seances
and spirit communication, all of which were totally common among
spiritualists but bizarre to Calvinists, Elizabeth came to think of
(15:59):
the only ghost as female and to believe that at
some point there would be a human incarnation of God
who was a woman. While she was in New York,
Elizabeth also became connected to a man named Abner Baker.
He was a Swedenborgian and they connected over matters of
religion and spirituality. They had an emotional affair carried out
through letters. Elizabeth justified this to herself by calling it
(16:23):
a quote harmonial marriage and something that was totally distinct
from her marriage to her husband. She described it this way,
quote can the thirsty, famishing soul help loving the pure
cold water? Neither can I help loving a pure man.
We'll get to what happened after Elizabeth got back to Illinois.
After a sponsor break, Elizabeth returned from New York to
(16:52):
Illinois in the early March off, and on December eighteenth
of that year, she gave birth to her last child, Arthur.
It doesn't appear that anybody questioned Arthur's paternity, and it's
also not totally clear whether Elizabeth's relationship with Abner was physical.
She did keep writing to him after she got home, though,
something that the Afulists eventually discovered after finding their letters.
(17:15):
Not long after Arthur's birth, the awful Ist also went
back East for about a month, and he again convinced
her family that she was mentally ill, something they did
not think was the case after her visit with them.
The Afulist church and Mantino was struggling. It was small
and it had only been in existence for four years
when he became the pastor there. At the beginning of
(17:37):
his time there, it didn't have a permanent meaning place,
so the congregation assembled at various schools as well as
at the Mantino Methodist Church. Meanwhile, as her husband was
struggling with this pretty small and not really established congregation,
Elizabeth was talking publicly about her views on religion, something
that her husband found embarrassing and unacceptable because what she
(17:59):
was saying so often contradicted what he was saying from
the pulpit, and many of these things that she was
talking about the Calvinists were heretical and dangerous. The Afulis's
brother in law, a Bija Dole, was also a deacon
at this church, and he eventually asked Elizabeth if she
would talk about her ideas in his Bible class. His
motivation seems to have been that if he let her
(18:21):
do this, people would see that what she was saying
was heretical nonsense, and just conclude that she was not
in her right mind. The class had six members when
she started her discussions, but before long it had picked
up to about forty new members. Soon, Theophilist and a
Bija thought Elizabeth's Bible class discussions were really dangerous. They
(18:42):
were having the opposite of effect of what they thought
might happen when they let her do it. Like we
said earlier, in the minds of a lot of Calvinists,
a lot of what she was talking about was heresy,
even though in other circles they were all totally normal ideas.
Even if it wasn't strictly heretical, it was really more
connected to her own experiences and her intuition than it
(19:04):
was too formal church doctrine that the awful Ist thought
they should really be focusing on. So after a while,
the awful List demanded that she stopped doing these Bible
class discussions. I love that these dudes are like forever
like trying to come up with ways to manage and
control her, and every time at backfires, It's like, no, yeah,
(19:25):
not so much. Elizabeth really wanted her husband's support in this,
and she told him that he should go into the
church and say, quote, my wife has just as good
a right to her opinions as you have to yours,
and I shall protect her in that right. And when
he refused to back her up, she asked the church
to release her from her membership so that she could
join the Methodist church instead, and her husband's church refused.
(19:50):
Having been raised Methodist, I'm like, why would you go
to the Methodists though, Like they would not really have
been into all of your spirituality and uh and for
be phrenology, but like not so much. You're going to
a medium and having saying and talking to your late mother.
It may have just seemed like the more permissive option
to Calvinists at the time, right, Yeah, It's like not
(20:12):
not perfect but better than what I've currently got going on. Yeah,
I don't. I also don't know if any of the
even more um liberal denominations had a church there at
that point. I maybe. Um So. At this point, the
awful List had been implying or outright saying that he
thought his wife was insane for quite some time, including
convincing her family that she wasn't well. Elizabeth really started
(20:34):
to fear that her husband was going to try to
institutionalize her, so she arranged with one of her oldest
sons that he would protect her personal papers if something
happened to her. Meanwhile, the awful List started gathering all
kinds of statements from church members and doctors attesting to
their opinion that Elizabeth was not well and needed to
be committed. On eighteen sixty, he also got fifteen members
(20:58):
of their church to sign a letter condemning her opinions
and behavior and urging her to repent. Yeah, so, he
was basically building a case that his wife was not sane,
But he didn't actually need to do all this to
have her committed. In eighteen fifty one, Illinois had amended
an earlier law which had established mental hospitals and this amendment,
(21:19):
at least in theory, was to protect married women. Before
the amendment was passed, if a person was going to
be committed, a jury had to find that there was
cause to do so. But with this new amendment, a
married woman quote who in the judgment of the medical
superintendent are evidently insane or distracted, maybe received and detained
(21:40):
in the hospital on the request of the husband without
the evidence of insanity or distraction required in other cases.
In other words, if husband asked and the medical superintendent
of a hospital judge that his wife was insane or distracted,
she could be committed with no further investigation or evaluation
(22:01):
into her mental state, and without taking her feelings or
wishes into account at all. So the men who crafted
this law did so with the idea that it would
protect married women from the indignity and shame of a
public trial about their sanity. In reality, though, it made
it possible for husbands to have their wives committed with
very little effort or process, and very little to protect
(22:24):
married women from being committed without cause. All the awfulness
needed to do was get letters from two doctors who
agreed with him about his wife's mental state. There were
plenty of people in town who genuinely did believe that
Elizabeth's religious opinions and behavior were evidence of a mental illness,
so this was not difficult to do. There were certainly
(22:44):
also plenty of people who just wanted her to shut up. Ultimately,
she was forcibly committed, and here is how she described it. Quote.
Early on the morning of the eighteenth of June eighteen sixty,
as I arose from my bed, preparing to take my
morning bath, I saw my husband and approaching my door
with our two physicians, both members of his church and
of our Bible class, and a stranger, gentleman, Sheriff Burgess.
(23:08):
Fearing exposure, I hastily locked my door and proceeded with
the greatest dispatch to dress myself. Before I had hardly commenced,
my husband forced an entrance into my room through the
window with an axe, and I, for shelter and protection
against exposure, in a state of almost entire nudity, sprang
into bed just in time to receive my unexpected guests.
(23:31):
The trio approached my bed, and each doctor felt my pulse,
and without asking a single question, both pronounced me insane.
According to her husband, the doctors were not there to
assist her mental state. Those assessments had already been done
and the decision had been made. Instead, he said they
were there to determine whether she could safely travel all
(23:51):
the way to the hospital, which was in Jacksonville, Illinois,
two hundred miles or about kilometers away. Elizabeth's account continue quote,
I was soon in the hands of the sheriff, who
forced me from my home by ordering two men to
carry me to the wagon which took me to the depot.
Esquire LaBrie, our nearest neighbor, who witnessed this scene, said
(24:12):
he was willing to testify before any court under oath
that Mrs Packard was literally kidnapped. I was carried to
the cars from the depot and the arms of two
strong men who my husband appointed for this purpose, amid
the silent and almost speechless gaze of a large crowd
of citizens who had collected for the purpose of rescuing
me from the hands of my persecutors. Elizabeth was admitted
(24:34):
to the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane.
Her children at this point were between the ages of
two and eighteen, and it would be three years before
she saw most of them again. So next time we
will talk about Elizabeth's time in the hospital and her
advocacy work that went on after she was discharged. I
have this moment when we're talking about particularly this last
(24:56):
part of the story with the husband, know, coming in
through a window with an axe, and I'm like, who,
who is the person who has some problems going on here? Right? Well,
we're going to talk about this more next time. Um.
But but one of the things that I read a
(25:18):
biography of her and like an account of this whole
situation called Elizabeth Packard A Noble Fight by Linda V.
Carlyle as I was researching this, and one of the
points that she makes was that Okay, obviously this, this
involuntary commitment, like this is a whole problem. She had
no due process, she had no protection. It was just
like her, her husband and the doctor deciding this and
(25:41):
forcibly removing her. Um. But if you look at both
of their writing, as their marriage was falling apart, they
both needed a break and like some treatment, Like they
were obviously both falling apart, and they were living in
a society that did not even think of things like
(26:01):
therapy like that wasn't even really an idea yet, but
it was like, apart from the idea of like a
mental illness that would require inpatient treatment to be successfully
managed or or treated in some way, like, there's just
the fact that like that they needed some care, both
(26:22):
of them, that they were not getting. So after that
infuriating last interlude of this story, I have some I think, uh,
less infuriating, not infuriating at all. Listener mail, I'm like,
how much less in Marria. So this is from Steve.
(26:43):
It is about our our Chester a Arthur birthplace episode.
And this is one of several um emails and tweets
and Facebook comments that we got on the subject, so
I just picked one of them. This is from Steve.
Steve says, hi there, always enjoy the show and just
had a question. On your latest podcast, you mentioned that
chester a Arthur had romantic relationships with two men while
(27:04):
he was a teacher. I tried to find more information
about that but couldn't find anything. I'd like to read
more about it if you had a reference for that information.
Thanks for your time and no worries if it's too
much trouble to find Steve, Thank you, Steve. That is
not too much trouble at all. So what we had
said in that episode was that Chester A Arthur had
romantic friendships with two other young men while he was
(27:28):
uh like in his early teaching career. Um And, I
think we've talked about romantic friendships on the show before.
These were friendships, generally between people of the same gender,
that tended to be like more emotive and passionate than
we often think of in terms of platonic friendships today.
(27:50):
Um And it was not. It was just something that
was regarded as just a normal part of life and
not really something that needed additional commentary or uh not
really viewed as um, socially questionable in anyway. It's clear
if you look at historical accounts that some people who
were outwardly fitting into this idea of romantic friendship were
(28:12):
really a couple. But a lot of it was more
like people who wrote each other really really passionate, affectionate letters,
or spooned while they were sleeping, or maybe we're physically
affectionate with each other in a way that today might
more signify that they were a couple, but at the
time signified that they were friends, not really having like
(28:32):
a romantic or sexual partnership. There is in the Presidential
podcast from The Washington Post a quote from one of
the letters that he wrote to his friend Campbell Allen, Um,
which is just very affectionate. And the other source that
was like a more substantive discussion of it was one
(28:54):
of the sources from the episode that was Scott Greenberger's
The Unexpected President, The Life and Times of Chester a Arthur. UM.
But a lot of the papers that discussed Chester a
Arthur in general, or this whole thing about his birthplace
many sort of a passing reference to these very romantic
letters that he wrote to a couple of other men
(29:16):
when he was a young man and um. And so
it's one of those things that like comes up a lot.
The letters themselves are in the Library of Congress. So
that is that explanation regarding romantic friendships. UM. Like we said, like,
if you look at the whole arc of lgbt Q history, Uh,
(29:37):
there are clearly folks in that same time period who
were like in love with each other and were a
romantic couple. And we're maybe able to fly under the
radar with it by the fact that these friendships were
regarded as totally normal. But if folks had known that
it went beyond that, there would have been a lot
(29:58):
more stigma. So that's that if you would like to
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(30:19):
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(30:41):
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
When we talk about nineteenth century mental health reformers here
in the US, one of the first names that probably
(00:23):
comes to mind is Dorothea Dix. Dix was the superintendent
of army nurses for the Union during the Civil War,
and she spent decades advocating for state funded hospitals for
people with mental illnesses and for better treatment of people
in those hospitals as well as in prisons. Another reformer
who was living at the same time was Elizabeth parsons
(00:45):
Ware Packard, who actually met Dix at one point. Dix's
advocacy work started after she saw the conditions of the
East Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts, where she'd been
asked to teach a Sunday school class. Packard's started after
she was in balling terrily committed to an asylum based
on her husband's determination that she was in the language
(01:05):
of the time insane. Packard met Dix while hospitalized. We
are going to talk about Packard's story over the next
two episodes, and today the focus is really on Packard
and her husband and how their marriage progressed from one
that was apparently happy to one that was just crumbling
and ultimately abusive. UM. We don't talk as much about
(01:28):
the mental health treatment and mental health reform in today's
episode as we will next time, but some of the
language that comes up as nut language we would like
we wouldn't typically just describe a person as insane today
without other context, but like that is the word that
was commonly used in her writing and his writing and
(01:49):
in the conversation at the time. Elizabeth Packard was born
Elizabeth Parsons Where on December eighteen sixteen in where, Massachusetts.
She was the oldest surviving child field of the Reverend
Samuel Ware, who was a Congregationalist pastor. She also had
two younger brothers. The Wares were a middle class family,
and Elizabeth was given a classical education along with her brothers.
(02:12):
The family moved to Amherst in eighteen six and Elizabeth
went on to attend the Amherst Female Seminary. Female seminaries
where schools meant to provide women with the same higher
education that was available to men, so they were focused
on academics rather than being focused on becoming good homemakers
and wives. Part of Elizabeth's religious experience was the Calvinist
(02:36):
idea of conversion. Conversion is not, of course unique to Calvinism,
but Elizabeth's family and church community were Calvinists. Even if
a person had been baptized and attended church regularly, they
weren't considered truly a member until after experiencing a religious
conversion and publicly professing their faith. Elizabeth's conversion happened at
(02:56):
a revival in eighteen thirty one, but she really had
some doubt about it. Conversion was rooted in a sense
of public repentance and salvation from sin, but Elizabeth just
didn't think of herself as all that sinful, and her words,
she quote, always had been doing as well as I
knew how to do. She felt as though she had
repented for her sins as they happened, rather than waiting
(03:19):
for a conversion experience to do it. She feared that
her conversion was just something that was expected of her
and not something that she genuinely felt. This process of
thinking through her own religious experience in ways that contradicted
her religious community was something that she would do for
the rest of her life. Elizabeth became principle of Randolph
Academy in West Randolph, Massachusetts, after she finished her studies
(03:42):
at Amherst Female Seminary, but just after her nineteenth birthday,
her career was interrupted by what was described as brain fever.
This was kind of a catch all term for illnesses
with symptoms like a high fever, sensitivity to light and sound, headache,
and an excited or agitated mind. It might be applied
to real conditions like encephalitis, meningitis, and migraines, but it
(04:06):
was also a diagnosis given to supposedly over excited or
over exerted women. Elizabeth's family called in a doctor, but
she didn't improve right away, so on January eighteen thirty six,
her father had her admitted at the Worcester Hospital for
the Insane. According to her patient records, her father suspected
that the problem was that her corsets relaced too tightly,
(04:29):
and that her work as a teacher was causing quote
too much mental effort. Her doctor, Dr Samuel B. Woodward,
described Elizabeth as being calm at sometimes and mentally excited
at other times. He also said that she had sores
and a manorrhea or missed menstrual periods. He prescribed a
range of treatments, including epsom salts and tincture of opium
(04:51):
for her pain. He also gave her the Griffith's mixture,
which included mir and was used to treat clarosis a
k A green sickness, which we talked about in our
episode on the Green Children of Woolpits. That was one
of those diseases that, for some reason, only women got.
Within a few weeks. Though Elizabeth seemed to be well,
her doctor described her as quote at all times now
(05:13):
very pleasant, and he discharged her as cured on March
eighteenth of eighteen thirty six. Elizabeth's own opinion on all
this was that her condition had been caused by the
initial treatment that she was given for brain fever, and
that she simply improved with time. The whole experience didn't
leave her with a very good opinion of conventional medicine
or of asylums. She was also profoundly embarrassed by it
(05:36):
and angry at her father for taking her to an asylum.
In the nineteenth century, it was very easy for women
to be labeled as hysterical or insane, and once people
thought of you that way, that impression tended to stick.
It's not exactly a tendency that has vanished. Nope. If
people decide your shrill or hysterical, you still are no
(05:58):
matter how you behave Later, on May twenty one, eighteen
thirty nine, Elizabeth married the Afulist Packard, Jr. Of Shelburne, Massachusetts.
The awful List was born on February first, eighteen o two.
He was educated through tutors and schools, and through his
father's religious instruction. The Afulist Senior was a Congregationalist minister.
(06:19):
The younger Theophilist, spent some time as a teacher at
the age of fifteen, but he found that he did
not really have the patients for it. The Awfulist started
college when he was fifteen as well, although he was
chronically ill, so his studies were often interrupted by health issues.
Although his father was the pastor at a well established church,
the Awfulist was one of eight children, so money could
(06:40):
be tight, and at times the awful List had to
take a break from school so that the family could
afford tuition for his younger brother. Like his future wife,
the Offulist had some ambivalence about his own conversion. He
went to a series of revival meetings starting in eighteen nineteen,
but he never really felt the sense of conviction that
he needed you. He finally converted in eighteen twenty three
(07:02):
and started studying to become a minister like his father.
Unlike the elder Theophilist, he never finished a divinity degree,
but he did join his father as co pastor of
Shelburne Congregational Church in eighteen twenty eight. When the Apulist
married Elizabeth, he was thirty seven and she was twenty two.
Despite their age difference, they both had similar backgrounds. Both
(07:24):
their fathers were Congregationalist ministers. They were both educated and
well read, They both opposed slavery, and they both wanted
to start a family. There wasn't really a love match,
though their temperaments were very different. Elizabeth was lively and
a little unconventional, and Theophilist was very sober and reserved.
(07:45):
And their journals and their writings about their early married life,
Elizabeth proudly and sometimes effusively talked about their home and
their children and the clothes that she made for them,
and she did it in a very personal way. The Aphilis,
on the other hand, was very practical and analytic goal
and he detailed things like the fact that he got
married and their household expenses and all these other Monday
(08:05):
matters without a lot of emotion involved. Elizabeth had lots
of suitors who were closer to her age, and she
seems to have married the Apulist mostly to please her father.
The two men were longtime associates, and Theophilist had known
her since she was ten years old. The awful List,
for his part, seems to have married her because he
was an established pastor and it was simply time for
(08:27):
him to have a wife. In spite of all these differences,
though for the next fifteen years, their relationship seems to
have been fine. They were financially comfortable, with a nice
house on six acres of land with an orchard. Elizabeth
filled the role of a minister's wife well, helping out
in the community and teaching Sunday school and generally being
an upstanding example. She was a good housekeeper and a
(08:50):
good host when other ministers visited them. They had a
child every two or three years. Another Theophilist, born in
eighteen forty two, Isaac known as Ira in eighteen forty four,
Samuel in eighteen forty seven, Elizabeth known as Libby in
eighteen fifty and George in eighteen fifty three. These were
both devoted parents, with Elizabeth raising the children and Theophilist
(09:13):
seeing to their religious instruction, and their life suddenly changed
in December of eighteen fifty three. And we'll get into
that after we first paused for a sponsor break. In
December of eighteen fifty three, the Afilist Packer Jr. Abruptly
(09:33):
resigned as co pastor of his Congregationalist church in Shelburne, Massachusetts.
The congregation tried to get him to stay, since his
father was in his eighties. By this point, it was
clear that the church was going to need entirely new
leadership if the younger Theophilist left. He refused to stay, though,
and the family packed up to move west. Neither the
(09:54):
Afilist nor Elizabeth really documented their reasons for his resignation
or their move, but there are several probable contributing factors.
The awful List may have thought a move would be
good for his health. He continued to have chronic illnesses
throughout his life. He had also always had some interest
in doing missionary work, which he might pursue out west,
(10:14):
and Elizabeth was excited about the idea of a new
adventure and a change of scenery. Apart from that, though,
the religious environment of New England was changing. The Presbyterian Church,
which had a lot of connections to the Congregationalist, was
in the middle of a schism between the Old School
and the New School. The Old School preferred very strict
(10:35):
traditional Calvinism, while the New School wanted to revise various
parts of the doctrine and was influenced by the revivalism
of the second Grade Awakening. The Awful Lists firmly belonged
to the Old School, while a lot of New England's
Presbyterians were beginning to favor the New School. Calvinism in
general was also starting to fall out of favor, with Unitarian, Methodist,
(10:57):
and Baptist churches becoming more popular. The Awful seems to
have thought that if he went west, away from all
these new influences, he might be able to establish a
church that was more in line with his traditional Calvinist views.
It also meant that he could get his wife away
from what he regarded as the corrupting influence of all
these new denominations and unconventional doctrines. She was becoming interested
(11:20):
in Transcendentalism and had started learning about Unitarianism, something that
the awful Is really wanted to discourage, not just for
her but also for how she raised their children. After
they went west, they spent a few years living in
parts of Ohio and Iowa, moving every year or two.
The Offulist was immediately dissatisfied, though he learned really quickly
(11:42):
that a lot of people had moved west to get
away from religious conservatism, and so he did not suddenly
find himself with a thriving congregation of people to lead
who really wanted to be in like a really old
school conservative Calvinist church. People were also suspicious of him,
especially because he was a Northerner, and a lot of
(12:02):
people who had migrated to the areas where they were
living hailed from the south. Plus, Elizabeth discovered that she
loved being away from New England's very strict social expectations.
She could be more relaxed in her clothes and her demeanor,
and she relished all the new ideas and experiences that
she was discovering. She wrote, quote, our New England habits
(12:22):
have been broken up. Our mold in which we were
cast has been broken up. We have had room for
expansive growth. We were too conservative rutt thinkers there. She
was obviously very happy about this, But the Offulis's assessment
of all of this was that his wife was quote
unfavorably affected by the tone of society and zealously espoused
(12:44):
almost all new notions and wild vagaries that came along.
So the Apulist had moved west with the hope of
establishing a conservative church and distancing his wife from all
these new modes of religious and spiritual thought, and instead
the opposite was happening. She made friends with phrenologists, and
she invited Unitarian ministers to stay with them, and she
(13:05):
started adopting spiritualist beliefs. Soon their marriage was really starting
to show some strain. Elizabeth wanted, in her words, a
manly man who would love her and support her. She
increasingly followed the idea known as new womanhood, that a
woman should be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive, with the
household and the child rearing matters falling under her sphere
(13:28):
of influence. The Awfulist, on the other hand, thought his
authority was the foundation of their marriage and that Elizabeth
should submit to it in all things. He was fine
with her making decisions about the home and the children
as long as they were the same as what he
wanted her to do. Elizabeth was also aware of the
growing movement for women's rights, and she found other like
(13:51):
minded people wherever she lived. They encouraged her to stand
up for herself and make her opinions known to her husband.
She did more and more missionary work out in the community,
even though her husband thought she was neglecting their home
to do it. The afu List was frustrated and dismayed
by this sudden, to his mind, lack of obedience and
femininity in his wife. On top of all that, the
(14:13):
family started having financial trouble thanks to their series of
relocations and remodeling the houses that they moved into, and
the fact that their congregations were just a lot smaller
and less affluent than they had been back east. Eventually,
the Packards moved to Mantino, Illinois, where Theophilist's sister lived
with her husband, A Bija Dole. The off List became
(14:34):
pastor at Mantino's first Presbyterian church. Very shortly after the move,
before they were really even settled in, Elizabeth went to
New York with their two youngest children to visit family.
At this point, Elizabeth seems to have really genuinely needed
a break. After all this moving around and financial troubles
and her increasingly contentious marriage. She was trying to maintain
(14:55):
a home and take care of five children without a
lot of help. She was increasingly frustrated by her husband's
lack of support for her and her opinions, and he
had started to imply to her that he didn't think
she was in her right mind, and the fact that
he was saying this to her really frightened and upset her.
Elizabeth described herself as being at her breaking point. She
(15:17):
wrote that she was quote seeking what my soul needed
but could not find at home the love and sympathy
of friends. But when she got to New York, she
learned that her husband had written to her family ahead
of her trip and told them that he thought she was,
in the language of the day, insane. In New York,
Elizabeth spent a lot of time with women's rights activists
(15:37):
and spiritualists. She went to several seances, and at one
of them, a medium gave her a message from her
late mother, Lucy Strong Parsons where who told her to
prepare for persecution. In addition to her belief and seances
and spirit communication, all of which were totally common among
spiritualists but bizarre to Calvinists, Elizabeth came to think of
(15:59):
the only ghost as female and to believe that at
some point there would be a human incarnation of God
who was a woman. While she was in New York,
Elizabeth also became connected to a man named Abner Baker.
He was a Swedenborgian and they connected over matters of
religion and spirituality. They had an emotional affair carried out
through letters. Elizabeth justified this to herself by calling it
(16:23):
a quote harmonial marriage and something that was totally distinct
from her marriage to her husband. She described it this way,
quote can the thirsty, famishing soul help loving the pure
cold water? Neither can I help loving a pure man.
We'll get to what happened after Elizabeth got back to Illinois.
After a sponsor break, Elizabeth returned from New York to
(16:52):
Illinois in the early March off, and on December eighteenth
of that year, she gave birth to her last child, Arthur.
It doesn't appear that anybody questioned Arthur's paternity, and it's
also not totally clear whether Elizabeth's relationship with Abner was physical.
She did keep writing to him after she got home, though,
something that the Afulists eventually discovered after finding their letters.
(17:15):
Not long after Arthur's birth, the awful Ist also went
back East for about a month, and he again convinced
her family that she was mentally ill, something they did
not think was the case after her visit with them.
The Afulist church and Mantino was struggling. It was small
and it had only been in existence for four years
when he became the pastor there. At the beginning of
(17:37):
his time there, it didn't have a permanent meaning place,
so the congregation assembled at various schools as well as
at the Mantino Methodist Church. Meanwhile, as her husband was
struggling with this pretty small and not really established congregation,
Elizabeth was talking publicly about her views on religion, something
that her husband found embarrassing and unacceptable because what she
(17:59):
was saying so often contradicted what he was saying from
the pulpit, and many of these things that she was
talking about the Calvinists were heretical and dangerous. The Afulis's
brother in law, a Bija Dole, was also a deacon
at this church, and he eventually asked Elizabeth if she
would talk about her ideas in his Bible class. His
motivation seems to have been that if he let her
(18:21):
do this, people would see that what she was saying
was heretical nonsense, and just conclude that she was not
in her right mind. The class had six members when
she started her discussions, but before long it had picked
up to about forty new members. Soon, Theophilist and a
Bija thought Elizabeth's Bible class discussions were really dangerous. They
(18:42):
were having the opposite of effect of what they thought
might happen when they let her do it. Like we
said earlier, in the minds of a lot of Calvinists,
a lot of what she was talking about was heresy,
even though in other circles they were all totally normal ideas.
Even if it wasn't strictly heretical, it was really more
connected to her own experiences and her intuition than it
(19:04):
was too formal church doctrine that the awful Ist thought
they should really be focusing on. So after a while,
the awful List demanded that she stopped doing these Bible
class discussions. I love that these dudes are like forever
like trying to come up with ways to manage and
control her, and every time at backfires, It's like, no, yeah,
(19:25):
not so much. Elizabeth really wanted her husband's support in this,
and she told him that he should go into the
church and say, quote, my wife has just as good
a right to her opinions as you have to yours,
and I shall protect her in that right. And when
he refused to back her up, she asked the church
to release her from her membership so that she could
join the Methodist church instead, and her husband's church refused.
(19:50):
Having been raised Methodist, I'm like, why would you go
to the Methodists though, Like they would not really have
been into all of your spirituality and uh and for
be phrenology, but like not so much. You're going to
a medium and having saying and talking to your late mother.
It may have just seemed like the more permissive option
to Calvinists at the time, right, Yeah, It's like not
(20:12):
not perfect but better than what I've currently got going on. Yeah,
I don't. I also don't know if any of the
even more um liberal denominations had a church there at
that point. I maybe. Um So. At this point, the
awful List had been implying or outright saying that he
thought his wife was insane for quite some time, including
convincing her family that she wasn't well. Elizabeth really started
(20:34):
to fear that her husband was going to try to
institutionalize her, so she arranged with one of her oldest
sons that he would protect her personal papers if something
happened to her. Meanwhile, the awful List started gathering all
kinds of statements from church members and doctors attesting to
their opinion that Elizabeth was not well and needed to
be committed. On eighteen sixty, he also got fifteen members
(20:58):
of their church to sign a letter condemning her opinions
and behavior and urging her to repent. Yeah, so, he
was basically building a case that his wife was not sane,
But he didn't actually need to do all this to
have her committed. In eighteen fifty one, Illinois had amended
an earlier law which had established mental hospitals and this amendment,
(21:19):
at least in theory, was to protect married women. Before
the amendment was passed, if a person was going to
be committed, a jury had to find that there was
cause to do so. But with this new amendment, a
married woman quote who in the judgment of the medical
superintendent are evidently insane or distracted, maybe received and detained
(21:40):
in the hospital on the request of the husband without
the evidence of insanity or distraction required in other cases.
In other words, if husband asked and the medical superintendent
of a hospital judge that his wife was insane or distracted,
she could be committed with no further investigation or evaluation
(22:01):
into her mental state, and without taking her feelings or
wishes into account at all. So the men who crafted
this law did so with the idea that it would
protect married women from the indignity and shame of a
public trial about their sanity. In reality, though, it made
it possible for husbands to have their wives committed with
very little effort or process, and very little to protect
(22:24):
married women from being committed without cause. All the awfulness
needed to do was get letters from two doctors who
agreed with him about his wife's mental state. There were
plenty of people in town who genuinely did believe that
Elizabeth's religious opinions and behavior were evidence of a mental illness,
so this was not difficult to do. There were certainly
(22:44):
also plenty of people who just wanted her to shut up. Ultimately,
she was forcibly committed, and here is how she described it. Quote.
Early on the morning of the eighteenth of June eighteen sixty,
as I arose from my bed, preparing to take my
morning bath, I saw my husband and approaching my door
with our two physicians, both members of his church and
of our Bible class, and a stranger, gentleman, Sheriff Burgess.
(23:08):
Fearing exposure, I hastily locked my door and proceeded with
the greatest dispatch to dress myself. Before I had hardly commenced,
my husband forced an entrance into my room through the
window with an axe, and I, for shelter and protection
against exposure, in a state of almost entire nudity, sprang
into bed just in time to receive my unexpected guests.
(23:31):
The trio approached my bed, and each doctor felt my pulse,
and without asking a single question, both pronounced me insane.
According to her husband, the doctors were not there to
assist her mental state. Those assessments had already been done
and the decision had been made. Instead, he said they
were there to determine whether she could safely travel all
(23:51):
the way to the hospital, which was in Jacksonville, Illinois,
two hundred miles or about kilometers away. Elizabeth's account continue quote,
I was soon in the hands of the sheriff, who
forced me from my home by ordering two men to
carry me to the wagon which took me to the depot.
Esquire LaBrie, our nearest neighbor, who witnessed this scene, said
(24:12):
he was willing to testify before any court under oath
that Mrs Packard was literally kidnapped. I was carried to
the cars from the depot and the arms of two
strong men who my husband appointed for this purpose, amid
the silent and almost speechless gaze of a large crowd
of citizens who had collected for the purpose of rescuing
me from the hands of my persecutors. Elizabeth was admitted
(24:34):
to the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane.
Her children at this point were between the ages of
two and eighteen, and it would be three years before
she saw most of them again. So next time we
will talk about Elizabeth's time in the hospital and her
advocacy work that went on after she was discharged. I
have this moment when we're talking about particularly this last
(24:56):
part of the story with the husband, know, coming in
through a window with an axe, and I'm like, who,
who is the person who has some problems going on here? Right? Well,
we're going to talk about this more next time. Um.
But but one of the things that I read a
(25:18):
biography of her and like an account of this whole
situation called Elizabeth Packard A Noble Fight by Linda V.
Carlyle as I was researching this, and one of the
points that she makes was that Okay, obviously this, this
involuntary commitment, like this is a whole problem. She had
no due process, she had no protection. It was just
like her, her husband and the doctor deciding this and
(25:41):
forcibly removing her. Um. But if you look at both
of their writing, as their marriage was falling apart, they
both needed a break and like some treatment, Like they
were obviously both falling apart, and they were living in
a society that did not even think of things like
(26:01):
therapy like that wasn't even really an idea yet, but
it was like, apart from the idea of like a
mental illness that would require inpatient treatment to be successfully
managed or or treated in some way, like, there's just
the fact that like that they needed some care, both
(26:22):
of them, that they were not getting. So after that
infuriating last interlude of this story, I have some I think, uh,
less infuriating, not infuriating at all. Listener mail, I'm like,
how much less in Marria. So this is from Steve.
(26:43):
It is about our our Chester a Arthur birthplace episode.
And this is one of several um emails and tweets
and Facebook comments that we got on the subject, so
I just picked one of them. This is from Steve.
Steve says, hi there, always enjoy the show and just
had a question. On your latest podcast, you mentioned that
chester a Arthur had romantic relationships with two men while
(27:04):
he was a teacher. I tried to find more information
about that but couldn't find anything. I'd like to read
more about it if you had a reference for that information.
Thanks for your time and no worries if it's too
much trouble to find Steve, Thank you, Steve. That is
not too much trouble at all. So what we had
said in that episode was that Chester A Arthur had
romantic friendships with two other young men while he was
(27:28):
uh like in his early teaching career. Um And, I
think we've talked about romantic friendships on the show before.
These were friendships, generally between people of the same gender,
that tended to be like more emotive and passionate than
we often think of in terms of platonic friendships today.
(27:50):
Um And it was not. It was just something that
was regarded as just a normal part of life and
not really something that needed additional commentary or uh not
really viewed as um, socially questionable in anyway. It's clear
if you look at historical accounts that some people who
were outwardly fitting into this idea of romantic friendship were
(28:12):
really a couple. But a lot of it was more
like people who wrote each other really really passionate, affectionate letters,
or spooned while they were sleeping, or maybe we're physically
affectionate with each other in a way that today might
more signify that they were a couple, but at the
time signified that they were friends, not really having like
(28:32):
a romantic or sexual partnership. There is in the Presidential
podcast from The Washington Post a quote from one of
the letters that he wrote to his friend Campbell Allen, Um,
which is just very affectionate. And the other source that
was like a more substantive discussion of it was one
(28:54):
of the sources from the episode that was Scott Greenberger's
The Unexpected President, The Life and Times of Chester a Arthur. UM.
But a lot of the papers that discussed Chester a
Arthur in general, or this whole thing about his birthplace
many sort of a passing reference to these very romantic
letters that he wrote to a couple of other men
(29:16):
when he was a young man and um. And so
it's one of those things that like comes up a lot.
The letters themselves are in the Library of Congress. So
that is that explanation regarding romantic friendships. UM. Like we said, like,
if you look at the whole arc of lgbt Q history, Uh,
(29:37):
there are clearly folks in that same time period who
were like in love with each other and were a
romantic couple. And we're maybe able to fly under the
radar with it by the fact that these friendships were
regarded as totally normal. But if folks had known that
it went beyond that, there would have been a lot
(29:58):
more stigma. So that's that if you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast or
history podcasts and how stuff Works dot com and then
we're all over social media, miss in History. That's where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. If you
come to our website, which is missing history dot com,
you can find show notes for all the episodes that
Holly Knight have ever worked on and a searchable archive
(30:19):
of every episode ever. And in the main menu where
it says live shows, you can see our upcoming live
shows that we're gonna do. You can also subscribe to
our show on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio app, and
wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuffy miss in History
Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
(30:41):
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
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Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Betrayal: Season 4
Karoline Borega married a man of honor – a respected Colorado Springs Police officer. She knew there would be sacrifices to accommodate her husband’s career. But she had no idea that he was using his badge to fool everyone. This season, we expose a man who swore two sacred oaths—one to his badge, one to his bride—and broke them both. We follow Karoline as she questions everything she thought she knew about her partner of over 20 years. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-3 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.