• The Play and Its Context

  • Introduction
  • Character Profiles
  • Concept Vocabulary
  • Elizabeth Packard Biography
  • Historical Timeline-Events Surrounding Mrs. Packard
  • Mental Illness in the 19th Century
  • Insane Asylums Unveiled
  • Women and the Law

• About This Production

  • Who’s Who in the Production
  • Rights and Wrongs: Talking with Emily Mann about Mrs. Packard
  • Emily Mann Biography

• Drama in the Classroom

  • Educators’ Introduction
  • Core Curriculum Standards
  • Pre-Show Preparation, Questions for Discussion and Activities
  • Post-Show Questions for Discussion and Activities

• Additional Resources

On its web site, in its discussion of the role of women in the United States, the US State Department admits that  “[i]n the first half of the nineteenth century, women were not allowed the freedoms men enjoyed in the eyes of the law, the church or the government. Women could not vote, hold elective office, attend college or earn a living. If married, they could not make legal contracts, divorce an abusive husband or gain custody of their children.”
                                               
As the century progressed, some slow progress was made.  In 1839, Mississippi became the first state to allow married women to own property separate from their husbands. But divorce law continued to favor husbands, who retained legal control of both property and children.

While the first important landmark in the women’s suffrage movement, the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY, occurred in 1848, leaders agreed to suspend their actions temporarily to push for the abolition of slavery.  Although disenfranchised, women played an important role in the progressive reforms of the nineteenth century.  One of the earliest of these activists was Dorthea Dix, who worked for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. Women also played an active role in the abolitionist movement, and in the later part of the nineteenth century, women led the temperance movement and founded settlement houses for the education and support of immigrants and the poor.  And of course, women fought their own long battle for the vote, which finally resulted in victory with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.