![]() ![]() ![]() For centuries, women’s natures had been thought inextricably linked to their reproductive organs and, over time, this supposedly scientific fact had evolved into the belief that it was natural for women to be fulfilled solely by being wives and mothers. The received medical wisdom of the age was that assertive, ambitious women were unnatural, and therefore sick. As she would record in a defense of her sanity that she wrote while in the asylum, she’d insisted, “I, though a woman, have just as good a right to my opinion as my husband has to his”-but assertive women in those days were swiftly dispatched to asylums, institutionalized for causing “the greatest annoyances to the family” and for defying “all domestic control.” No wonder Elizabeth had found herself on the wrong side of a locked ward door in the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, in Illinois. Elizabeth, a housewife and mother of six, had simply stood up to her domineering husband. ![]() Yet according to 19th century psychiatry, female independence was madness. ![]()
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