Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop

rdf:langString Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop

rdf:langString Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop

rdf:langString Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop

rdf:langString Saratoga, New York, U.S.

rdf:langString Rochester, New York, U.S.

rdf:langString Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester

rdf:langString "A Woman of the Century"

rdf:langString English

rdf:langString American

rdf:langString A Secret Institution

rdf:langString Social reformer, autobiographer

rdf:langString Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop (April 12, 1847 – September 11, 1892) was an American social reformer and autobiographer. Her prominence came from her remarkable experience, being confined and unlawfully imprisoned in the Utica Lunatic Asylum for 26 months (October 1880 – December 1882), through a plot of a secret enemy to kill her. She eventually managed to communicate with James Bailey Silkman, a lawyer who, like herself, was confined in the same asylum under similar circumstances. He succeeded in obtaining a writ of habeas corpus, and Judge George G. Barnard of the New York Supreme Court pronounced Lathrop sane and unlawfully incarcerated. After that time, she devoted her life to ameliorating the laws relating to lunacy. Lathrop felt she owed it to women to take her case before the New York State Legislature, and demand reform in this direction, but she was unsuccessful in two efforts and found herself penniless and facing the need to support herself. After several efforts, she became a court stenographer, and ten years after her release, wrote a book, the story of her own institutionalization, entitled A Secret Institution. Published at her own expense, this book led to the formation of the Lunacy Law Reform League, in 1889, a national organization with headquarters in New York City, of which Lathrop became the secretary and was the national organizer.