Education: Essay

Dorothea Dix

by Dr. Graham Warder, Keene State College

Dorothea Dix was born on April 4, 1802 in the frontier town of Hampden, Maine. The daughter of an alcoholic and impoverished Methodist preacher, she had a troubled childhood and later presented herself as an orphan to conceal her upbringing. At twelve, she moved to Boston to live with her wealthy grandmother. She became a teacher for girls, wrote and published moral tales for children, and came under the influence of Unitarianism, the religion of Boston’s elite. She developed a powerful network of allies, including William Ellery Channing for whose children Dix served as a nanny. Channing was the American leader of a revitalized Unitarianism that promoted various social reforms. Dix later become acquainted with and deeply respected by Boston Brahmin society’s leaders -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and Samuel Gridley Howe, important allies in her later career as a professional reformer.

Dix, like many Americans of the 1820s and 1830s, was influenced by the religious upheavals of the Second Great Awakening and the social and economic upheavals of the Market Revolution. Her spiritual wanderings led her away from the emotional backcountry religiosity of her father to the more rational ideology and assumptions of moral stewardship that Boston’s Unitarians embraced. It was a shift from fire and brimstone sensibilities to something much cooler and more elitist and genteel. In other words, her soul and psyche journeyed from “fire” to “ice.” Her journey also took her from the nomadic poverty and marginality of her father’s life to the opulent success and intellectual wealth of Boston’s high society.

Both theology and class led people like Dix to express concern for the unfortunate. But she did not truly discover her life’s work until she was almost forty years old. She experienced a debilitating bout of depression and physical illness in 1836, and then traveled to England and stayed for five years. There she learned of reforms in the treatment of insanity. She met Samuel Tuke, the superintendent of the York Retreat and a leader in British asylum reform. He was the grandson of William Tuke, an early proponent of “moral treatment” for mental disorders. “Moral treatment” asserted that the mentally ill could be nurtured back to rationality in “home-like” settings.

She returned to Massachusetts and in 1841 began teaching Sunday school to women at the East Cambridge jail. There she observed firsthand that many inmates had a psychiatric disability and suffered from abuse and neglect. Appalled by the conditions she witnessed at the jail, she embarked on a career as a sort of early investigative reporter, at a time when no such career existed. Thereafter, reforms in the care for the insane became her passion and purpose in life. Dix found her calling, a mission. She traveled throughout Massachusetts examining jails and almshouses to collect evidence that she used to create an argument for why better care was needed. In January, 1843, she presented her petition before the state legislature in an effort to increase the size of the State Hospital for the Insane in Worcester. In Gothic vividness, Dix declared, “I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience....” In her petition, hers is the only voice. In her calls for sympathy, we see things through her eyes alone. She holds a monopoly on perspective.

Dix’s efforts took her outside the accepted cultural norms of behavior for women. In 1843, women could not vote, and respectable women were expected to remain within their “sphere,” the world of children, morality, piety, and home. Women had moral authority but no political power. Dix became an effective and active political lobbyist at the state and federal levels of government, and she assumed a public role very rare for a woman of her generation. But her activities were also carefully limited. Dix wrote, but men spoke. Dorothea Dix never directly addressed the Massachusetts Legislature or the United States Senate or House of Representatives. She instead relied on powerful male allies to speak for her.

Despite voices raised in local newspapers questioning Dix’s account, her emotionally powerful memorials were a success. In her first appeal (many others would follow), the Massachusetts legislature granted a large increase in funding for the Worcester institution. In the long career ahead, Dix would travel throughout the country to lobby for the building of asylums by the states and even the federal government. She played a direct role in the establishment of 32 state institutions for the care of the mentally ill.

During the Civil War, Dix was placed in charge of all female nurses in Union military hospitals and aspired to be the American Florence Nightingale. She believed that women, not men, were superior caretakers, but she also demanded that all nurses be plain looking and at least 30 years of age.

Dix spent her last years in declining health, residing as a guest at the visitors’ quarters of the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton. She died in 1887.