two doctors and a form

a couple signatures and a disgruntled man

In 1898 New York it only took a certificate of lunacy with the signatures of two doctors and a judge to make a woman disappear. No crime. No trial you’d recognize. Just one simple, expedient legal procedure. I uncovered this sad little fact while doing research. And here is where I should say “it stopped me cold.”

But it didn’t.

I read it and thought, “Yup.”

The specifics were new to me, the number of signatures, the tidy efficiency of the process. The rest wasn’t. I recognized it with the weary dispassion of meeting an old enemy. One who’s been fought many times.

So, there you are. Again.

The power to decide what happens to a woman, what she owns (including her children and her own body) even whether her account of reality is legitimate, is held in many hands. Husbands. Fathers. Judges. Doctors. Clergy. Legislators.

That power remains where it’s always resided, it’s simply using new instruments to achieve the same end: conservatorships, custody courts, involuntary commitment proceedings, statehouses, Congress. It’s still viable. We’ve just added more forms, with better fonts.

There is a reason the novel that has been dogging me for years is set in 1898. Not because the past is atmospheric, or fascinating (okay, partly because it’s atmospheric and fascinating). And definitely not because I wanted to provide the reader an escape.

Quite the opposite, if anything. History provides the leeway a modern setting doesn’t. Set my story in the present and the reader immediately begins to examine the mechanics. Could this really happen? Could that judge legally do such a thing? I would do my research, make the case airtight, and still lose readers’ attention to spite-googling.

But set it in 1898 and the reader is more willing to accept the premise. Yes, this could happen. Yes, it did happen.

Which leaves room for more important questions. Not only “how did this happen” but “what factors made it possible?” Not just “That’s monstrous” but “I know that monster.”

That’s one of the reasons I write about the past. Not because I have discovered some intriguing bit of esoteria I feel obliged to present to you (though there is plenty of that. But for other posts) but because so much of our present was wired in the past.

And if we examine the blueprints for that wiring, we might see how it works and see why it was designed that way and, yes, see the architect.

There he is. Again.