Dorothea Dix was nearly 40 when she first stepped foot inside the East Cambridge Jail in 1841 to teach Sunday school to women incarcerated there. Dix was born in 1802 in Hampden, Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts. When she was a child, her family moved to Worcester, where her struggling parents could get support from extended family. Dix began her professional career as a teacher at a girls’ school in Worcester while still a teenager herself, and by 1821 she had opened her own school in Boston, which attracted wealthy families. She also ran a “parallel school” for poor children, often those who had been neglected by their parents and had no other means of getting an education. Dix was also an author, writing children’s stories with religious or moral lessons as part of the narrative.
Although raised a Catholic, Dix gravitated toward Unitarianism and its emphasis on social reform. After failing health forced her to close her girls’ school, Dix took a position as a governess for the family of William Ellery Channing, a prominent Unitarian minister in Boston, and her experiences working and traveling with the Channing family exposed her to the Unitarian perspective on issues such as poverty, education and enslavement. From 1831 to 1836 she ran a second girls’ school, but mental health struggles led her to close the school; she traveled to Europe for rest and recuperation. During her time in Europe, Dix joined a circle of British activists who believed that government should be actively responsible for social reforms. Most likely because of her own struggles, Dix was particularly interested in the cause of care for those with mental illness, then known as “lunacy reform,” which sought to improve conditions in public facilities for those committed to the care of the state.
Upon her return to America in 1840, Dix began to implement the lessons she had learned from British reformers, applying them to the institutions she encountered in Massachusetts. Taking over the women’s Sunday school class at the East Cambridge Jail in 1841, Dix had the opportunity to see firsthand how those with mental health issues were treated in the public incarceration system. Dix was concerned about the lack of differentiation between those who had committed crimes and those who were mentally ill; she saw that prisoners’ mental health was not assessed appropriately or dealt with by prison authorities because of a lack of resources, and that some of the inmates were not accused of any crime, but were placed in the jail alongside criminals because there was nowhere else for them to go. Dix reported visiting the basement of the jail, where she found four women whose cells were “dark and bare and the air was stagnant and foul.” These women had not committed any crime, but their “lunacy” had caused them to be housed at the jail because there was no other public institution available to treat and house them.
Dix’s experiences at the East Cambridge Jail spurred her to write a scathing “Memorial” to the Massachusetts Legislature, in which she decried the treatment of the mentally ill in state facilities, “in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” As a result of her efforts, Massachusetts expanded care for those with mental illness at the state mental hospital in Worcester. Dix continued her campaign to raise awareness of the state of mental health treatment in government-run facilities all along the East Coast, and was instrumental in the establishment of the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania in 1853. She also traveled abroad, assessing the state of public mental health facilities in Nova Scotia, Scotland and the Channel Islands. During the Civil War, Dix was appointed superintendent of nurses for the Union Army, a role she used to bring attention to the mental and well as physical health needs of soldiers. Dix continued her pioneering research and advocacy work until her death in 1887, spending the last years of her life at the New Jersey State Hospital that she had helped to found decades before. In death, Dix returned to the place her advocacy career began, and she now rests at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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