FALL 2026
The Continuity of Control: The Shifting Faces of Patriarchal Control over Women from Witchcraft in the 1600s to Hysterics in the 1800s
Aaliyah Linton
Lone Star College–Kingwood
Aaliyah Linton is a second-year accounting student in the Honors College at Lone Star College–Kingwood and a recipient of the Dennis Boe Paper Award. Her research on the Salem Witch Trials and 19th-century hysteria stems from her previous work on the Satanic Panic, as well as a personal connection to the women she studies and the ways their stories have been shaped over time. Through her work, she aims to better understand—and give voice to—experiences that history often oversimplifies, with a particular interest in the intersection of identity, fear, and historical narrative.
ABSTRACT
Throughout history, women who challenged the limits of socially accepted behavior have often been reinterpreted according to the prevailing ideological framework of the era. This research explores how the transition from witchcraft accusations in the seventeenth century to hysteria diagnoses in the nineteenth century reflected evolving patriarchal methods of controlling women, with an aim to identify the shifting but continuous roles of religious and medical authorities in shaping that control. Using a comparative historical approach, the study examines two emblematic cases that are not often considered together: Bridget Bishop, the first woman executed during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, and Elizabeth Packard, institutionalized as “insane” in 1860 after challenging her husband’s authority. Drawing on court records, autobiographies, and contemporary commentary, the analysis traces how Puritan ministers and magistrates interpreted women’s defiance as evidence of evil influence, while later doctors and asylum superintendents reclassified similar behaviors as symptoms of nervous or psychiatric disorder. The findings indicate that although the explanatory vocabularies shifted from spiritual threat to medical pathology, both systems served to legitimize interventions that restricted women’s autonomy and reinforced prevailing gender expectations. The significance of this study lies in demonstrating how institutional power adapted across time to maintain authority over women who resisted prescribed roles, offering a foundation for future research into the persistence of such patterns, along with considerations regarding nineteenth century medical practices, consent, and the laws pertaining to divorce and mental health.
INTRODUCTION
Across history, women who pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior have been recast through whatever explanatory system held authority at the time. In one era, a woman might be labeled a witch; in another, she might be deemed hysterical, but these shifting frameworks reveal less about the women themselves than about the societies intent on regulating them. In seventeenth-century New England, the Salem Witch Trials unfolded in a climate of religious anxiety and communal suspicion, where unexplained conflicts or misfortunes were readily interpreted as signs of evil influence. Nearly two centuries later, nineteenth-century America witnessed a different but equally powerful interpretive system: the rise of hysteria as a medical diagnosis, applied to women whose emotions or behavior seemed to stray from the norms of domesticity and self-restraint. Physicians, rather than ministers or magistrates, now served as arbiters of female deviation, identifying signs of “nervous disorder” where earlier generations saw spiritual threat. Though separated by time and ideology, both moments reveal how dominant institutions framed women’s nonconformity through the language of the era, whether supernatural or scientific, and responded with mechanisms of discipline that reflected broader cultural anxieties.
This study investigates that transformation by tracing how religious and medical institutions each mobilized their authority to discipline women who disrupted gendered expectations. Through a comparative analysis of Bridget Bishop, the first woman executed as a witch in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, and Elizabeth Packard, a woman institutionalized as “insane” in 1860, the research examines how shifts in explanatory frameworks—from spiritual diagnosis to psychiatric classification—altered the language but not the stakes of defining female deviance. Both cases highlight the pressures placed on women whose behavior challenged conventions of obedience, modesty, or intellectual submission, and they illuminate how institutional authority responded to such challenges. By situating these women within the broader transition from theological to medical models of interpretation, the analysis explores the extent to which patriarchal power adapted to cultural change by adopting new forms of expertise that continued to regulate women’s autonomy.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The topics of the Salem Witch Trials and nineteenth-century hysteria are both rather common topics within historical scholarship, yet they are rarely examined together as part of a continuous system of gendered regulation. The use of witchcraft itself in the United States is typically situated within the context of early American religious culture, while hysteria is generally treated as a chapter within the greater history of medicine. This disciplinary separation has obscured the degree to which both events drew on authoritative explanatory systems to reinterpret women’s nonconformity as a threat to the established social orders of each respective time period. Considering such literature altogether further reveals possible shared mechanisms through which institutional power reshaped female dissent into forms of deviance, even as the vocabulary shifted from spiritual reasoning to the more scientific.
Research on the 1692 Salem Witch Trials has established the trials as deeply woven into the fabric of Puritan social and religious life. Analyses of seventeenth-century New England highlight how community anxieties were filtered through a worldview that read disorder in spiritual terms, allowing suspicions of women who disrupted social expectations to acquire theological significance beyond simple deviance.1,2 Cultural studies of the period further show how witchcraft accusations became meaningful within this framework, emerging at the intersection of fears about female autonomy, social order, and moral decline.3 Feminist and gender-focused work reinforces this understanding by demonstrating that women who occupied socially ambiguous or assertive positions often drew disproportionate scrutiny, their behavior interpreted as incompatible with ideals of submissive femininity4 and how the cultural figure of the witch absorbed collective anxieties about women’s agency, transforming social conflict into narratives of supernatural threat5.
Parallel interpretive structures emerge in the literature on eighteenth- and nineteenth century hysteria, though filtered through an increasingly medicalized epistemology. Rather than relying only on religious ideas, the studied accounts framed women’s resistance, distress, or intellectual ambition as symptoms of disorder requiring expert intervention. Sources that focus on medical narratives and diction argue that medical writers of the period developed a narrative form in which women’s experiences were reorganized into clinical symptoms, granting physicians the authority to reinterpret or override female testimony.6 Research on eighteenth century medical writing illustrates that though the Enlightenment brought about a turn to physiological explanations, it preserved assumptions about women’s inherent instability, suggesting that the shift toward scientific language represented a reconfiguration—not a removal—of earlier ideas.7,8
Legal and autobiographical sources illustrate how these frameworks shaped lived experience. Analyses of nineteenth-century dependency law explain how married women’s civil status left them vulnerable to institutionalization under medical authority, blurring the boundaries between domestic power and psychiatric judgment.9 Elizabeth Packard’s writings offer first-hand evidence of how this convergence operated in practice. Her descriptions of being declared insane for maintaining religious opinions contrary to her husband’s and confined under laws permitting commitment “without evidence” capture the extent to which medical and marital authority collaborated in defining female dissent as pathology.10 Her accounts of witnessing women punished for expressing disagreement, their objections catalogued as symptoms, further reveal how institutional logic converted resistance into evidence of illness.11
Taken together, these literatures describe two iterations of the same regulatory impulse. Seventeenth-century religious authority construed women’s noncompliance as spiritual danger, while nineteenth-century medical authority reframed similar behaviors as psychological disorder. Despite the shift from courts and ministers to asylums and physicians, the underlying logic remained stable: female autonomy was repeatedly reinterpreted through the dominant explanatory system of the period, enabling institutions to discipline women whose voices or actions disrupted established hierarchies and norms. By bringing scholarship on the Salem Witch Trials and hysteria into direct conversation, this project highlights the continuity between the two and clarifies how patriarchal power adapted to evolving intellectual climates without relinquishing its capacity to define and contain female deviance.
1 Williams, Claire. "Understanding the Salem Witch Trials through the Lens of Feminist Criminological Theory." Trinity Women & Gender Minorities Review 3, no. 1 (2019): 97-108.
2 Demos, John. “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England.” The American Historical Review 75, no. 5 (June 1970): 1311. doi:10.2307/1844480.
3 Reed, Isaac. “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (July 2007): 209–34. doi:10.1177/1749975507078188.
4 Williams, Claire. "Understanding the Salem Witch Trials through the Lens of Feminist Criminological Theory." Trinity Women & Gender Minorities Review 3, no. 1 (2019): 97-108, 102.
5 Rosen, Maggie. "A feminist perspective on the history of women as witches." (2017).
6 Showalter, Elaine. “On Hysterical Narrative.” Narrative 1, no. 1 (1993): 24–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20106990.
7 Meek, Heather. “Of Wandering Wombs and Wrongs of Women: Evolving Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, nos. 2–3 (June 2009): 105–28. doi:10.1353/esc.2009.a404822.
8 Scheurich, Neil. “Hysteria and the Medical Narrative.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 4 (June 2000): 461–76. doi:10.1353/pbm.2000.0054.
9 Hartog, Hendrik. "Mrs. Packard on Dependency." Yale JL & Human. 1 (1988): 79.
10 Packard, E. 1870. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial, and Self Defense from the Charge of Insanity; Or Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10555.
11 Packard, E. 1868. The Prisoner’s Hidden Life: Or Insane Asylums Unveiled. As Demonstrated by the Report of the Investigating Committee of the Legislature of Illinois, Together With Mrs. Packard’s Coadjutors’ Testimony. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10554.
ANALYSIS
Bridget Bishop and the Religious Construction of Female Deviance
Bridget Bishop’s prosecution in 1692 illustrates how Puritan institutions interpreted women’s defiance through a religious framework that equated gender nonconformity with spiritual danger. Although the formal charges centered on witchcraft, the descriptions preserved in the Salem Witchcraft Papers reveal that suspicions of Bishop likely grew primarily from her social presence—her independence, assertiveness, and refusal to embody the modest behaviors associated with ideal Puritan womanhood. Though most villagers’ primary accounts regarding Bishop involve some form of witchcraft speculation, it is important to note that nearly every account begins with the recounting of alleged arguments with Bishop.12 Within a culture that tied female virtue to silence, domesticity, and submission, the argumentative traits she was said to have likely signaled disorder long before they were framed as evidence of demonic involvement.
This interpretive flexibility emerged from the Puritan worldview, which positioned spiritual forces as the primary explanation for social conflict. Disorder in the community was understood as evidence of spiritual struggle, a logic that allowed anxieties about disobedience or female autonomy to be recast as threats to the godly commonwealth. Studies of seventeenth century New England emphasize how gender expectations shaped this process: women who occupied ambiguous social positions or displayed excessive independence were easily read as morally unstable and thus spiritually vulnerable.13,14 Cultural analyses show that accusations became meaningful when they aligned with existing fears—particularly fears that women who rejected domestic confinement might undermine the cohesion of a fragile religious community.15 Within this structure, Bishop’s behavior provided a ready canvas for theological interpretation. This logic gains further clarity when considering how the “witch” operated as a cultural figure onto whom anxieties about female agency were projected.16 The witch was less a practitioner of sorcery than a symbolic repository for fears about women who threatened patriarchal structures through assertiveness, sexual autonomy, or nonconformity. Bishop embodied these transgressions. Her assertiveness conflicted with the expectation that women should cultivate self-effacement and compliance. These deviations created interpretive pressure that religious authorities resolved through the language of diabolical influence or the practice of witchcraft.
Puritan courts, supported by ministerial input, transformed these gendered concerns into legal-theological charges. The proceedings did not rely on verifiable evidence but on the dated interpretation of demeanor, reputation, and community fears—forms of testimony that embedded cultural judgments about femininity within spiritual explanations. When neighbors described Bishop as harmful or corrupting, their assessments reflected not knowledge of occult behavior but discomfort with a woman whose actions challenged the boundaries of acceptable femininity and whose presence served as an easy scapegoat for misfortune. In this sense, witchcraft functioned as a flexible explanatory framework that could assimilate almost any form of female resistance. Once labeled spiritually dangerous, Bishop’s autonomy became unintelligible as anything other than further evidence of her negative supernatural allegiance.
The result was a system in which the meaning of a woman’s behavior was determined not by her own account but by institutional authorities who claimed privileged access to spiritual truth. Bishop had no interpretive agency; her denials merely deepened suspicion, as any resistance could be reframed as deception. This dynamic reveals the disciplinary nature of the Puritan worldview, which converted women’s autonomy into spiritual disorder to justify coercive intervention. Through Bishop’s case, it becomes evident that witchcraft prosecution functioned as a method of social regulation: a way to absorb anxieties about female independence into a religious narrative that validated patriarchal control. The mechanisms of meaning-making— testimony, theological interpretation, and legal enforcement—worked together to render Bishop’s behavior legible only as deviance, foreshadowing how later institutions would reinterpret similar challenges through the language of medical pathology.
Elizabeth Packard and Medicalized Patriarchy in the 19th Century
The shift from religious to medical authority in the treatment of women who defied gender norms becomes particularly evident in the case of Elizabeth Packard. As intellectual paradigms began to transition towards Enlightenment rationalism, the mechanisms of control over female nonconformity evolved. Where women like Bridget Bishop were once accused of spiritual disorder and witchcraft in religious courtrooms, women like Packard were later diagnosed as mentally ill and hysterical by physicians in asylums. This shift did not signal a break in patriarchal control but rather a rearticulation of the same logic through medical discourse.
Packard’s case began not with erratic conduct but with theological disagreement. After expressing religious views that diverged from her husband’s Calvinist doctrine, she was institutionalized under the charge of insanity.17 This divergence marked her as unruly within a framework that equated feminine virtue with submission, and in the emerging medical system, her views were reinterpreted as symptoms of mental disorder rather than legitimate convictions. The state of Illinois, as well as other states at the time, enabled a husband to commit his wife without a public hearing or review “as long as one doctor agreed and the asylum superintendent was willing to accept her”18, a system in which rendered women as dependents, lacking full civil personhood. The medical certainty surrounding her case reflects the cultural confidence in psychiatric authority that framed her emotional intensity and intellectual defiance as symptoms of hysteria.
Once inside the asylum, Packard’s autonomy continued to be undermined. Her insistence on her beliefs were interpreted as pathological stubbornness, with her husband even stating that she was “incurably insane so long as [she] could not return to [her] old standpoint of religious belief”19—her behavior reinforcing her diagnosis rather than challenging it. The medical professionals, as well as her husband, had the authority to override her testimony, much like the ministers who had ruled on others’ spiritual state in earlier times—mirroring earlier theological judgments, where women’s voices were rendered suspect, and their defiance reinterpreted as evidence of evil. Packard’s case highlights the continuity of patriarchal logic, now articulated through medical expertise. Just as earlier religious authorities had branded women like Bishop as spiritually dangerous, so too did medical professionals label Packard’s defiance as a mental illness.
Comparative Synthesis: Bishop and Packard
The cases of Bridget Bishop and Elizabeth Packard, though separated by nearly two centuries and distinct institutional contexts, reveal a continuous structure of patriarchal discipline operating beneath dramatic shifts in cultural explanation. Both women were targeted not because they performed supernatural or pathological acts but because they violated expectations of feminine obedience, modesty, and silence within their respective societies. Their defiance, however mild or reasoned by contemporary standards, was reframed through the suitable interpretive systems of their eras—first theological, then medical—allowing authorities to recast nonconformity as a threat that required institutional correction. While the frameworks that defined women’s deviance evolved, the underlying logic remained the same: female autonomy signaled disorder, and disorder demanded elimination or control.
In seventeenth-century Salem, Bishop’s independence was read through the religious cosmology that informed the Puritan worldview. Witnesses described her not only as an alleged sorceress who appeared in visions and caused misfortune, but as an outspoken woman who argued with others, even men.20 Her social visibility and assertiveness provoked anxiety because they contradicted an ideal of female humility and domestic restraint. Under Puritan theology, such deviations were not merely improper behavior but evidence of spiritual vulnerability and involvement with evil forces. Ministers and magistrates understood the world as a battleground between God and the Devil; thus, women who disrupted communal expectations could be interpreted as instruments of the latter.
Packard’s nineteenth-century experience displays a strikingly similar process, though filtered through a different set of diagnostic categories. Rather than being accused of consorting with supernatural forces, she was declared insane for defending theological views that diverged from her husband’s and her church. She wrote that she had simply “defended some religious opinions”21 but that this was enough to make her a target of psychiatric intervention. Her husband’s decision to commit her relied on a legal system that defined married women as dependents, and on physicians willing to equate disagreement with disorder. Upon her arrival the doctors “felt [her] pulse, and without asking a single question both pronounced [her] insane,”22 reproducing the same interpretive dynamic seen in Bishop’s case: behavior that challenged patriarchal norms was immediately reclassified through the institution’s authoritative vocabulary. Where the Puritans saw spiritual disobedience, nineteenth-century physicians saw nervous or psychological disorder. The interpretive frame had evolved, but the target remained the same.
The continuity of control becomes clearer when examining the institutions that processed these women. For Bishop, discipline took place in courtrooms shaped by religious authority, where spectral evidence and theological assumptions were admissible tools for evaluating female behavior. For Packard, the asylum replaced the courtroom as the institutional site where women were examined, judged, and confined. The Illinois asylum practices, which allowed a husband to commit his wife without a trial, reflected a fusion of domestic and medical authority that paralleled the older union of ministry and law in Puritan New England. As Packard observed, a woman could be declared insane “without evidence”23, revealing how institutional standards of proof were shaped not by objective criteria but by the perceived threat of her independence. Likewise, Salem magistrates accepted emotional testimony, spectral visions, and communal fears as legitimate evidence, grounding legal action not in empirical facts but in the enforcement of moral order.
The rhetorical strategies used to discipline Bishop and Packard further reveal this structural continuity. The vocabulary differed—Bishop could be labeled “evil” and “of the devil,” while Packard was deemed “insane” and “hysterical”—but the function of these labels was identical in how they stripped women of authority over their own voices. In the Salem records, Bishop’s accusers consistently described her demeanor and presence as threatening, transforming ordinary conflict into spiritual endangerment. Similarly, Packard wrote that her protests were repeatedly interpreted as symptoms of insanity. Both women inhabited interpretive systems in which their explanations could not be trusted, because opposition itself was considered proof of guilt or illness.
This interpretive entrapment reflects a deeper patriarchal logic: when institutions assume that women’s resistance is inherently disordered, they create conditions in which women cannot assert credibility without reinforcing the charge against them. Bishop could not deny witchcraft or her knowledge of it without appearing deceptive; Packard could not claim sanity without appearing delusional. Each system relied on a hermeneutic that foreclosed female self-definition and narrative. The Puritan minister and the asylum superintendent served parallel roles as experts empowered to discern hidden truths beyond women’s own accounts. Packard wrote that Dr. McFarland insisted she could not be released until she would “reconfirm her subservience”24, echoing the Puritan expectation that Bishop’s salvation depended on confession and eternal repentance. Compliance was framed as recovery or innocence, and resistance as deepening disorder.
Both cases also illuminate how patriarchal systems adapt by integrating new forms of legitimacy. Puritan authorities wielded scriptural and theological authority, grounding their judgments in divine order. Nineteenth-century asylum authorities wielded scientific and medical legitimacy, grounding their judgments in emerging psychiatric theory and medicine. Yet in both periods, these legitimating frameworks obscured the gendered assumptions embedded within them. Both institutions claimed neutrality—religious courts as guardians of the godly community, asylums as centers of healing—but both enforced the same standards of acceptable womanhood.
The comparison also underscores how patriarchal systems use institutional authority to regulate women’s bodies and voices. Bishop’s body became a site of spiritual meaning; her speech, gestures, and clothing were scrutinized for signs of moral corruption. Packard’s body became a site of medical intervention; her speech, beliefs, and tone were read as symptoms. Bishop’s speech was reinterpreted as deception or diabolical manipulation—her inability to define the term “witch” becoming another reason against her; Packard’s speech was rewritten as delusion or hysteria—her protests and silence equally evidential of her declining mental state. In both cases, women’s own accounts were displaced by institutional narratives that claimed greater access to truth.
Ultimately, placing Bishop and Packard side by side reveals a long arc of patriarchal adaptation. As the acceptable cultural framework shifted from theology to medicine, the mechanisms of control persisted, migrating from sermons and courtrooms to asylums and clinical diagnoses. Both women were punished not for supernatural crimes or demonstrable mental illness but for asserting forms of autonomy that challenged male authority. The systems that confined them differed in language and institutional form, yet operated through a shared logic: women who resisted prescribed roles were redefined as threats—first to the soul, then to the social body. The evolution of these frameworks illuminates how patriarchal authority can survive cultural change by continually generating new authoritative vocabularies through which to label, contain, and correct nonconforming women.
12 Ray, Benjamin C., Tara S. Wood, and Paul S. Boyer. The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcriptions of the Court Records, revised, corrected, and augmented ed. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2002.
13 Demos, John. “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England.” The American Historical Review 75, no. 5 (June 1970): 1311. doi:10.2307/1844480.
14 Reed, Isaac. “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (July 2007): 209–34. doi:10.1177/1749975507078188.
15 Williams, Claire. "Understanding the Salem Witch Trials through the Lens of Feminist Criminological Theory." Trinity Women & Gender Minorities Review 3, no. 1 (2019): 97-108, 102.
16 Rosen, Maggie. "A feminist perspective on the history of women as witches." (2017).
17 Packard, E. 1873. Modern Persecution, or Insane Asylums Unveiled. As Demonstrated by the Report of the Investigating Committee of the Legislature of Illinois. Vol. I. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10556, 34.
18 Hartog, Hendrik. "Mrs. Packard on Dependency." Yale JL & Human. 1 (1988): 79, 81.
19 Packard, E. 1870. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial, and Self Defense from the Charge of Insanity; Or Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10555, 5.
20 Ray, Benjamin C., Tara S. Wood, and Paul S. Boyer. The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcriptions of the Court Records, revised, corrected, and augmented ed. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2002.
21 Packard, E. 1870. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial, and Self Defense from the Charge of Insanity; Or Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10555, 3.
22 Ibid, 4.
23 Packard, E. 1870. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial, and Self Defense from the Charge of Insanity; Or Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10555, 4.
24 Hartog, Hendrik. "Mrs. Packard on Dependency." Yale JL & Human. 1 (1988): 79, 81.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the cases of Bridget Bishop and Elizabeth Packard highlight the persistent patterns of patriarchal control and the regulation of women’s autonomy, though their methods evolved from religious to medical frameworks. Both women were targeted not for supernatural or pathological acts, but for their defiance of societal expectations for women during their respective time periods. These cases reveal how dominant power structures adapted to changing intellectual paradigms, rebranding themselves as religious or scientific authority, but maintaining the same behavior: controlling women who challenged their roles. This continuity of control underscores how patriarchal systems, though appearing to shift, ultimately remain rooted in the regulation of female behavior. In highlighting these enduring patterns, this research exposes the mechanisms through which patriarchal authority persists across eras, offering insight into how similar dynamics might continue to shape women’s lives today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Demos, John. “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England.” The American Historical Review 75, no. 5 (June 1970): 1311. doi:10.2307/1844480.
Devereux, Cecily. “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 40, no. 1 (March 2014): 19–45.
doi:10.1353/esc.2014.0004.
Hartog, Hendrik. "Mrs. Packard on Dependency." Yale JL & Human. 1 (1988): 79.
Karunakar, Deeksha. "A Study of Salem Witch Trial: A Gender and Religion Based Discrimination." Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology 25, no. 4 (2021): 9536-9552.
Meek, Heather. “Of Wandering Wombs and Wrongs of Women: Evolving Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, nos. 2–3 (June 2009): 105–28. doi:10.1353/esc.2009.a404822.
Packard, E. 1868. The Prisoner’s Hidden Life: Or Insane Asylums Unveiled. As Demonstrated by the Report of the Investigating Committee of the Legislature of Illinois, Together With Mrs. Packard’s Coadjutors’ Testimony. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10554.
Packard, E. 1870. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial, and Self Defense from the Charge of Insanity; Or Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10555.
19
Packard, E. 1873. Modern Persecution, or Insane Asylums Unveiled. As Demonstrated by the Report of the Investigating Committee of the Legislature of Illinois. Vol. I. https://oaks.kent.edu/node/10556.
Ray, Benjamin C., Tara S. Wood, and Paul S. Boyer. The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcriptions of the Court Records, revised, corrected, and augmented ed. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2002.
Reed, Isaac. “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (July 2007): 209–34.
doi:10.1177/1749975507078188.
Rosen, Maggie. "A feminist perspective on the history of women as witches." (2017).
Scheurich, Neil. “Hysteria and the Medical Narrative.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 4 (June 2000): 461–76. doi:10.1353/pbm.2000.0054.
Showalter, Elaine. “On Hysterical Narrative.” Narrative 1, no. 1 (1993): 24–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20106990.
Williams, Claire. "Understanding the Salem Witch Trials through the Lens of Feminist Criminological Theory." Trinity Women & Gender Minorities Review 3, no. 1 (2019): 97- 108.
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