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Reviewed by:
  • Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer
  • Ellen Dwyer
Thomas J. Brown. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Harvard Historical Studies, no. 127. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiii + 422 pp. Ill. $35.00.

For many years, there was no scholarly biography of Dorothea Dix. Now there are two: David Gollaher’s Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix (1995), and Thomas J. Brown’s Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer (1998). Although both books rely heavily upon the Houghton Library’s large collection of Dix’s personal papers, they complement, rather than duplicate, one another. Reading Brown sent me back to Gollaher and forward again to Brown. The experience deepened my understanding of Dix; it also raised fascinating questions about the complex relationship between subject and biographer. Gollaher situates Dix’s asylum work in its larger historiographic context, drawing on Grob, Scull, and Foucault. Brown describes himself as interested in Dix “as a participant in American politics rather than as a humanitarian visionary” (p. xii). Like Gollaher, he expresses awe at her commitment, but overall he is more critical of her. Both are fascinated by the political energy and skills of this nineteenth-century female reformer who, despite her disdain for the female suffrage movement, became a familiar and enormously influential figure in state legislatures and Washington, D.C.

The first historian to use the diaries of Dix’s close friend, Anne Heath, and her family, Brown describes the young Dix as an awkward, lonely woman whose emotional demands eventually led Heath and others to distance themselves. Like Gollaher, Brown is sometimes frustrated by Dix’s guarded prose, which reveals [End Page 714] little of her inner life beyond the intensity of her commitment to reform. For the most part, he responds in kind, producing a careful, somewhat severe portrait. For example, he notes that a harsh New England childhood and adolescence made Dix very demanding of herself (and others)—at times excessively so. Her high self-expectations, however, served her well once she became involved in asylum work. Despite bouts of ill health (triggered as often by personal disappointments and stress as by physical frailty), she traveled ceaselessly across the country, lobbying for the construction of state mental hospitals. Critical of her hostility to the suffrage and antislavery movements, Brown argues that Dix “lived at the center of both the so-called separate spheres of female virtue and public affairs” (p. xii). Over time, this location became increasingly uncomfortable. In 1857, after years of effort, Dix’s bill for federal land-grant monies for mental hospitals was defeated. Then, in the 1860s, as general superintendent of nurses for the Northern Army, she found herself unable to maintain, let alone build, administrative power. As a young Louisa May Alcott noted, by 1862 Dix’s nurses viewed her as “‘a kind old soul, but very queer, fussy, and arbitrary; not one likes her and I don’t wonder’” (quoted on p. 313).

Because Dix revealed so little of the personal in her voluminous correspondence, the colorful, albeit harsh, characterizations of her by Alcott and others have a perhaps disproportionate impact on this biography. Equally powerful, however, is Brown’s chronicling of Dix’s extraordinary public career; in the United States of the nineteenth century (as well as into the twentieth), strong, uncompromising (and hence often discomfiting) personalities helped women like Dix sustain themselves in their arduous, often lonely, political work. A minor, but powerful, example of hardship is Dix’s lack of a permanent home: she spent much of her life moving between boarding houses, the homes of wealthy friends and relatives, and hotels; once, in Texas, after her stagecoach became mired in mud, she even spent the night in the bottom of a gully. In old age, having survived most of her family and friends, she stayed in a suite at the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton, where she died in 1887. Brown ends the book by bringing us back to Boston for Dix’s burial in Mount Auburn Cemetery, near her longtime mentor William Ellery Channing, where, says Brown, she was “at home at last” (p. 344).

Ellen Dwyer
Indiana University

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