In the 1880s, a court declared that Henrietta Wiley – a wealthy New York heiress and socialite – was a habitual drunkard and put her under guardianship. Her court-appointed guardian subsequently committed her to an insane asylum, where she was incarcerated for almost two years.
Guardianship, also known as conservatorship, is a diminished legal status that strips adults who have become incapable of taking care of themselves or their affairs of civil rights associated with full citizenship and legal personhood, including the right to property, contract, make a will, and, in some states, to vote. Designed to protect vulnerable adults, guardianship remains susceptible to ulterior motives and outright abuse because each case represents a collision of individual family dynamics with competing interests in the estate.
An obscure and poorly understood corner of civil law, guardianship for mentally unsound adults has existed in the English legal tradition since the early modern period, and in North America, the colonial period. After American independence from Great Britain, legislatures and courts across the United States expanded guardianship to include “habitual drunkard[s],” as they were called in the language of state statutes and case files.
American courts conducted inquisitions to determine if the alleged lunatic or habitual drunkard required guardianship. Rather than a criminal prosecution, the inquisition was a civil proceeding that could only be initiated by a private petition. Typically, court-appointed commissioners, not judges, conducted these hearings. Attorneys from both sides questioned and cross-examined witnesses in front of a jury who ultimately decided.
Henrietta’s case is especially strange because most people who were put under guardianship during the nineteenth century, including 99% of habitual drunkards, were men of means. For respectable men with families and property, the loss of civil rights associated with citizenship and legal personhood represented a shameful loss of social, political, and economic status. However, women did not gain full citizenship until the twentieth century. Henrietta’s inheritance must have represented what few civil rights she had. Furthermore, many male habitual drunkards never found themselves committed to an asylum. Henrietta’s institutionalization made her case even more unique.