Dorothea dix biography summary format
Fig. 1 - Dorothea Dix plaque.
Dorothea Dix: Biography
Dorothea Lynde Dix was born on April 4th, 1802 in Hampden, Maine in the United States. Dix seems to have had a troubled childhood. It is believed that both of her parents suffered from alcohol addiction and that her father was abusive. Because of this, she was sent to live with family in Boston, where she continued her education and developed a love for teaching. Dix worked industriously and, in a few short years, began teaching, designing curriculum, and opening schools in Boston and the surrounding areas.
Even though her household wasn't the best she learned many things from her father that would later influence many of her life choices. As a young girl, her father taught her how to read and write. Because of this, once she entered school she was way ahead of everyone else. Dix developed a passion for reading and teaching and she taught her brothers how to read as well.
Health troubles caused Dix to reduce the time she spent in the classroom. During this period, she wrote several foundational and educational books that found great success in the classroom. Her poor health continued to interrupt her teaching career and even forced her to close her schools. However, following her illness, she took a trip through Europe that would give her renewed direction in life.
Dorthea Dix: Beginnings of Reform
During her travels, Dix was inspired by young reformers in Europe. She took up their passion for the welfare of prisoners, medical patients, and those with mental disorders. When she returned to the United States, Dix spent time visiting and assessing the state of care in prisons and mental institutions across the country. She found conditions and treatment in these facilities to be shockingly inhumane and ineffective. Dix reported her findings to local politicians and urged for better facilities and treatment standards.
At the time, prisons adhered to no regulated standards of management or care. Thos
Dix, Dorthea Lynde
in: People
Miss Dorothea Dix (1802 – 1887): Teacher, Nurse, Social Reformer and Advocate for the Mentally Ill
by Dr. Graham Warder, Keene State College
Dorothea Dix was born on April 4, 1802 in the frontier town of Hampden, Maine. Her father was poor, a drifter, and probably an alcoholic. He was also a Methodist minister and thus preached to the common folk. Dorothea had a troubled childhood and later portrayed herself as an orphan. She may have been concealing her upbringing out of embarrassment. 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 wealthy elite who had rejected Congregationalism in the early 1800s. Unitarianism was a softer faith than the one in which she had been raised. Unitarians, for example, were less likely to emphasize sinfulness, hell, and damnation than either Methodists or Congregationalists. It was more likely to stress reason and the role of wealthy people in setting examples for those they saw as social inferiors.
In Boston, Dix developed a powerful network of allies, including the Rev. William Ellery Channing, for whose children Dix served as a nanny. Channing was the American leader of a revitalized Unitarianism that promoted all sorts of social reforms. He favored an active humanitarian outlook. Because of her connections with Channing, Dix become acquainted with and deeply respected by Boston’s Brahmin leaders — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and Samuel Gridley Howe, important allies in her later career as a professional reformer.
Dix came of age during a period of tremendous change. Like many Americans of the 1820s and 1830s, she was influenced by the religious upheavals of the Second Great Awakening, the revivalism sweeping the nation. She also witnessed the social and economic upheavals of the
Dorothea Dix’s Early Life
Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, in 1802. Her father Joseph was an itinerant Methodist preacher who was frequently away from home, and her mother suffered from debilitating bouts of depression. The oldest of three children, Dorothea ran her household and cared for her family members from a very young age. Joseph Dix, though a strict and volatile man prone to alcoholism and depression, taught his daughter to read and write, fostering Dorothea’s lifelong love of books and learning. Still, Dorothea’s early years were difficult, unpredictable and lonely.
Did you know? Louisa May Alcott was a nurse under Dorothea Dix during the Civil War. Alcott recalled that Dix was respected but not particularly well liked by her nurses, who tended to “steer clear” of her. Alcott wrote of her experiences in “Hospital Sketches,” years before achieving fame with the classic “Little Women.”
At 12 Dorothea moved to Boston, where her wealthy grandmother took her in and encouraged her interest in education. Dix would eventually establish a series of schools in Boston and Worcester, designing her own curriculum and administering classrooms as a teenager and young woman. In the 1820s Dix’s poor health made her teaching increasingly sporadic, forcing her to take frequent breaks from her career. She began to write, and her books—filled with the simple dictums and morals that were thought to edify young minds—sold briskly. By 1836, persistent health problems caused Dix to close her latest school for good.
Dorathea Dix: The Asylum Movement
That same year Dix traveled in England with friends, returning home months later with an interest in new approaches to the treatment of the insane. She took a job teaching inmates in an East Cambridge prison, where conditions were so abysmal and the treatment of prisoners so inhumane that she began agitating at once for their improvement.
Prisons at the time were unregulated and unhygienic, with violent criminals
Dorothea Dix
(1802-1887)
Who Was Dorothea Dix?
Dorothea Dix was a social reformer whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread international reforms. After seeing horrific conditions in a Massachusetts prison, she spent the next 40 years lobbying U.S. and Canadian legislators to establish state hospitals for the mentally ill. Her efforts directly affected the building of 32 institutions in the United States.
Early Life
Dorothea Lynde Dix was born on April 4, 1802, in Hampden, Maine. She was the eldest of three children, and her father, Joseph Dix, was a religious fanatic and distributor of religious tracts who made Dorothea stitch and paste the tracts together, a chore she hated.
At age 12, Dix left home to live with her grandmother in Boston, and then an aunt in Worcester, Massachusetts. She began teaching school at age 14. In 1819, she returned to Boston and founded the Dix Mansion, a school for girls, along with a charity school that poor girls could attend for free. She began writing textbooks, with her most famous, Conversations on Common Things, published in 1824.
Champion of the Mentally Ill
The course of Dix’s life changed in 1841 when she began teaching Sunday school at the East Cambridge Jail, a women’s prison. She discovered the appalling treatment of the prisoners, particularly those with mental illnesses, whose living quarters had no heat. She immediately went to court and secured an order to provide heat for the prisoners, along with other improvements.
She began traveling around the state to research the conditions in prisons and poorhouses and ultimately crafted a document that was presented to the Massachusetts legislature, which increased the budget to expand the State Mental Hospital at Worcester. But Dix wasn’t content with reforms in Massachusetts. She toured the country documenting the conditions and treatment of patients, campaigning to establish humane asylums for the mentally ill and founding or add