[6] At the insistence of her parents, Ware married Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard, fourteen years her senior and said to be "cold and domineering", on 21 May 1839.
Beginning in 1857, after having lived in Ohio and Iowa for short periods, the family moved to Manteno, Illinois, and appeared to have a peaceful and uneventful marriage.
[4] While the main subject of their dispute was religion, the couple also disagreed on methods of child rearing and managing family finances, as well as the morality of slavery, with Elizabeth defending abolitionist John Brown, which embarrassed Theophilus.
Sarah Haslett in turn delivered the letter to Judge Charles Starr, who issued a writ of habeas corpus ordering Theophilus to bring Elizabeth to his chambers to discuss the matter.
After being presented with Theophilus' evidence, Judge Starr scheduled a jury trial to allow a legal determination of Elizabeth's sanity to take place.
Elizabeth's lawyers, Stephen Moore and John W. Orr, responded by calling witnesses from the neighborhood who knew the Packards but were not members of Theophilus' church.
Dr. Duncanson had interviewed Elizabeth and he testified that while not necessarily in agreement with all her religious beliefs, she was sane in his view, arguing that "I do not call people insane because they differ with me.
She was legally declared sane, and Judge Charles Starr, who had changed the trial from one about habeas corpus to one about sanity, issued an order that she should not be confined.
[14][4][26] As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard described it, "[while] we will never know Elizabeth's true mental state or the details of her family life (...) soon after being discharged, she convinced a jury of her sanity.
[15] Packard did not return to her former life, but became a national celebrity, publishing "an armload of books and criss-crossing the United States on a decades-long reform campaign", not only advocating for married women's rights and freedom of speech, but speaking out against "the power of insane asylums".
As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard has argued, Packard reinvented herself in this role, earning enough to support her children and even her estranged husband, from whom she remained separated for the rest of her life.
[14] Packard petitioned the Illinois and Massachusetts legislatures, and in 1869 legislation was passed in those states allowing married women equal rights to property and custody of their children.
[29][4][30] In 1867, the State of Illinois passed a "Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty" which guaranteed that all people accused of insanity, including wives, had the right to a public hearing, as did Massachusetts.
[7] Even so, she was strongly attacked by medical professionals and anonymous citizens, unlike others such as Dorothea Dix, with her former doctor from the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, Dr. Andrew McFarland, who privately called her "a sort of Joan D'Arc in the matter of stirring up the personal prejudices".
She only received broader recognition, starting in the 1930s, by a well-known historian of mental illness, Albert Deutsch, and again in the 1960s from those who were "attacking the medical model of insanity".
[33] Linda V. Carlisle wrote another biography, published by University of Illinois Press in 2010, entitled Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight.
"[39] Troy Rondinone, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, made a similar argument, arguing that people should remember "Packard’s battle for women in the mental health care system.