The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

Although she had never met anyone in her cousin’s town of Granville before, the positive reputation that Elizabeth managed to garner in relatively short order is a testament to the personability and charisma that almost everyone she interacted with recalled as the hallmarks of her character. Her newfound allies were particularly upset by the lengths to which Theophilus had gone to not only prevent Elizabeth from seeing her children but to manipulate them into thinking of their mother in a way that was contrary to the woman they remembered. Separating a woman from her children went against every Victorian sensibility; a woman’s assessed virtue as a mother was tied to the strength of the relationships she had with her children, and the citizens of Granville felt it was not only unnatural but cruel of Theophilus to separate them. Just as her friends had staged in Manteo, her new friends in Granville held a public indignation hearing to voice their disapproval of her treatment. In raising money for her, they were helping to give her the autonomy she did not otherwise have as a married woman. Their further support in publishing her writing also provided a testament to their belief in her cause and their conviction that what she had learned in her time at Jacksonville needed to be shared with the world to prevent further injustices from being levied against vulnerable people. The extra offprints that Elizabeth paid for offered her the opportunity to disseminate her work beyond the readership of the Granville newspaper and constituted the first publications she managed to secure a printed run for. In her experience in Granville, Elizabeth finds that her Tenacity, Perseverance, and Integrity as Weapons Against Injustice have paid off, earning her the esteem and respect of many. Finally, she is matched by others who share her sense of Duty, Moral Obligation, Righteousness, and Advocacy for Others.

Whether Theophilus exhibited pride or irrationality in his statement, his claim that he and the children were better off without Elizabeth is absurd when one considers that the house had deteriorated in upkeep, cleanliness, and general order since she left. Elizabeth was particularly brilliant in conspiring with her friends to ensure that Theophilus played into their hands exactly as they wanted him to. Habeas corpus did not apply when Elizabeth was in Jacksonville, and it would not have applied if Theophilus had succeeded in securing her a place at Northampton. By predicting his behavior and inciting her imprisonment with the theft of the keys, Elizabeth and her friend ensured she would be eligible for a habeas corpus hearing. Theophilus did not have the right to imprison her against her will the way he did, so the court heard her case. Their timing was impeccable. Theophilus and his cronies tried to claim that Elizabeth was being treated in a “suitable manner” (292) based on the fact that she was “insane,” but by the time the case had reached the court system, there were far too many people who had become aware of his nefarious motives to give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that his actions were genuinely undertaken for her own good. In this section, Theophilus’s Hypocrisy, Vengeance, Vindictiveness, and Abuse of Power Versus Duty, Moral Obligation, Righteousness, and Advocacy for Others begin to work against him as public and judicial sentiment turns toward Elizabeth.

As read to the court, Elizabeth’s arguments were elegant and persuasive in their presentation and overwhelmingly theologically sound. Theophilus resented her from the beginning for having a better command of her audience as an orator and for being a superior communicator. There certainly were men of the period who became truly convinced that their wives, sisters, mothers, daughters etc., were “insane” because these women held opinions different from their own. White, Protestant, middle and upper-class men were often so convinced of their intellectual prowess and that their supposed God-given place of authority in society was sovereign and merit-based instead of purposefully, systemically perpetuated. The presumption that they should have the right to act as arbiters of others regardless of whether or not their virtues, personal merits, experiences, and level of intellect compared to those over whom they had power was pervasive. Men’s opinions and observations of their female relatives as they existed in the home were valuable to “asylum” superintendents and physicians because they were thought to have authority and expertise given the level of information and intimate contact they had directly with their female relatives. How someone behaved in public may manifest as one presentation, while how they behaved at home and what was revealed in private, personal settings was another. Rarely, however, did physicians critically examine how a man’s motives might shape and even drive their desire to commit a woman over whom they held dominion. Men gave other men certain leniencies and benefits of the doubt. As socially designated protectors, the upstanding among them saw their role as sacred, but there also existed a reluctance to intervene and interfere in the private management of another man’s home, ostensibly because it meant their own authority in their own sphere could theoretically be threatened. Lack of introspection meant that these men presumed their rightness and virtue and that of those they considered their equals and peers. It was a subconscious way of upholding the power structure so many of them benefitted from. Men accepted that other men were fulfilling their roles of protectors virtuously based on the notion that those social values meant something to others.

There were, however, those heroic men who saw their expectations as both societal and personal and committed to acting on behalf of others especially when other men appeared to be abusing their power to a particularly egregious extent. Such was the case with Elizabeth’s sons, friends, judges, jurors, and experts who testified at her trial. They perceived their duty as extending toward women who were not being protected and defended as a man should and stepped in to preserve the ideals they believed women should benefit from. A man’s status and social power certainly dictated the extent to which he was granted leniency in this regard by his peers. Theophilus, in significant debt, living in squalor once Elizabeth left, and known throughout his community as someone prone to selfishness, manipulation, and cruelty, was more easily humbled by the courts, but McFarland, in the later years to come, continued to hold his position and maintain his friendships and allegiances despite the evidence against him. After her liberation, Theophilus’s greatest allies against Elizabeth understandably came from those who did not personally know him—his opinions were published in newspapers, and his rights were respected in Massachusetts, presumably because, in large part, the people offering him support had no way of knowing just how far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior his treatment of his wife had been.

In this section and the one to follow, men emerge as Elizabeth’s supporters and advocates on a greater scale. Many of the men who become involved are not young reformers with progressive views surrounding legal rights for women but protective, fatherly, brotherly, gentleman-defender figures. Educated, virtuous, and enlightened men demonstrating true Victorian values of Duty, Moral Obligation, Righteousness, and Advocacy for Others saw Elizabeth’s case as righteous and worthy, regardless of which parts of theology and academia formed their belief systems. Simply because a male supporter agreed with and advanced Elizabeth’s cause did not mean he should necessarily be considered progressive outside of his historical context—it may have been an abstract chivalric or paternalistic instinct that drove them to their duty to shield women from baser men and in so doing distinguish themselves as an example of what masculinity and gentlemanliness should be, but most of the men who supported her were angry on her behalf, and many wanted to make sure that no other women suffered the same fate.