Women had few rights of their own—not to own property, not even legal rights to parent the children she birthed. In Illinois, if a couple divorced, the man got to dictate the terms of custody, and if he wanted to keep a woman from seeing her babies, he could. If a woman was deemed too much trouble, was too opinionated or intelligent, if she had what a man regarded as any emotional instability, he had the legal right to take her to an asylum and institutionalize her. While Rebecca Brown Mitchell wasn’t institutionalized, she was imprisoned, as she called it, in the iron cage of the law.[2]
