Preview

Why Is Dorothea Dix Forgotten

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
380 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Why Is Dorothea Dix Forgotten
Dorothea Dix: A Women Not Forgotten In History
Dorothea Dix worked as an educator, a reformer for the treatment of mentally ill, and as an author in the mid nineteenth century.
Dorothea Dix formed many schools at different times in her life and worked towards educating young minds. She began teaching when she was around 14 or 15 years of age. She worked to teach young girls during a time where doing such was controversial. Dix also focused her efforts towards writing educational books, such as Conversations on Common Things in 1824 and The Garland of Flora in 1829 as two examples. It is admirable how she invested herself and made an impact on these children, despite suffering bouts of illnesses.
In 1840 to 1850s, Dix investigated and advocated

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Dorothea Dix grew up in Massachusetts, but was born in Hampden Maine.Her early years were hard and very lonely because her father was an Methodist preacher. She had to take care of the house and her family because her mother was mentally ill and her father was usually away.Dorothea was the oldest of three children. When Dorothea was 12 years old she moved to Boston to live with her grandmother. In Boston and Worcester she established a lot of schools.Dorothea loved to read books and learn. She was a teacher, author and reformer. She left her 24 year career of teaching and started nursing at age 39. In march of 1841 Dix went to court about how mentally ill were treated like prisoners. They were chained in small dark spaces, filthy and abused.…

    • 201 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Education, religion, and the condition of the poor were all aspects of society that women felt morally obliged to improve. Dorothea’s action in asylum reform portrays how women of the time maneuvered through the legal world of men in order to gain social reform. Although, Dorothea returned to America in 1837, it was not until 1841 when invited by Reverend John T. G. Nichols to teach a Sunday school in the East Cambridge jail in New England, did Dorothea begin her…

    • 263 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in 1802 and died in 1887. She was an author, teacher, and reformer. She worked with prisoners and the mentally ill people. Because of this she helped make dozens of new institutions in the United States and in Europe and also helped change peoples’ view of these people.…

    • 503 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Reforms in prisons and insane asylums began to take flight in America as Dorothea Dix, an American reformer, began advocating for safe places for the mentally unstable to reside. Her pursuit of such an institution began in 1941. Dix helped to form five phychiatric hospitals in America. Phychiatric hospitals were given a bad reputation when some hospitals were not treating the patients, rather their main concern was giving the mentally unstable a place to stay where they would not be a disturbance to the rest of society. Also during this time, prisons were holding anyone who had commited massive crimes to those who were unworthy of arrest. Men, women, and children were all detained the same prisons despite the severity of their crimes. Because…

    • 203 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dorothea Dix once said, "in a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do." In the 19th century, when Dorothea Dix was born and lived during, many changes were occurring in the United States. The War of 1812, then the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War all occurred during Dorothea Dix's lifetime, which likely had a large impact on her outlook on the United States and her visions for her own future. Dorothea Dix was a powerful, passionate woman, who change the world through her work in insane asylums and through her work as the head of nurses in the Civil War.…

    • 440 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dorothea Dix. http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/dorotheadix.html (Accessed Nov. 12, 2013) This site provided information about her other careers besides her reform crusades.…

    • 569 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/dorotheadix.html. The website is an excellent source that chronicles Dix's early life. As a child she lived in a household with a mentally unstable mother and an alcoholic father. This site details her first career as a teacher, then her second career as a social reformer. The Webster site gives an abundance of specific detail about how Dix influenced people and how passionate she was about her beliefs. The last portion of the website biography laments the fact that Dix and her accomplishments are sadly under-reported in most history and psychology textbooks, but that…

    • 948 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dorothea Dix – was the leader of the penitentiary and asylum reforms as she felt that criminals came from unstable families and wanted to rehabilitate them rather than punish them. She battled against the grant of public mental facilities which eventually won over in majority of the states in 1860.…

    • 967 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    entered the nursing field as a matron at New England Hospital in 1874. She left in 1876 and spent two years in England before enrolling at Boston City Hospital Training School for Nurses. In 1880 she was hired to start a training school at Montreal General Hospital. In 1881, she was offered the superintendence of the Training School for Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1889, she moved to New York as the director of nursing at St. Luke's Hospital, and from there became superintendent of nursing at the Presbyterian Hospital of New York from 1892-1921. Maxwell was also the first director of the Presbyterian Hospital's nursing school, founded in 1892, which later became the Columbia University School of Nursing. She did commendable job in nursing throughout her life to bring many laurels in healing…

    • 415 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    She started her educational career in 1838, that lasted more than 12 years in Georgia, becoming one of the first women to teach during the 1800s’. Barton enjoyed teaching so much, that she decided to attend the Liberal Clinton institute in New York, to improve her writing and language skills. Clara opened the first public school in New York. Her goal was to teach young children that didn’t have opportunities to attend school due to low income. After years of working as an educator, Clara decides to Work as a clerk in the US Patents Office, becoming the first woman to work for the Federal Government and to have an equal pay as men. Many men and political opposed with her position. Clara was a woman and an African-American rights activist, she was part of woman’s suffrage movement. Clara wrote plenty of books about her life; In 1907 Clara published her autobiography book “The Story of My Childhood”. The Red Cross awarded Clara with the International Red Cross medal.…

    • 988 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    There were very many influential people in the 1930s. One that stuck out the most was Dorothea Lange. She was a professional photographer, a very known professional photographer, during the Great Depression and even after that. She documented the struggle of migrant farm families. Lange photographed the pain and despair of women, men, and children living in dirty, miserable camps. She also photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets of San Francisco (Migrants). Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the FSA or the Farm Security Administration. Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development…

    • 1527 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    She was born on April 4, 1802, in Hampden, Maine (History.com). Her family had difficulties because her father was an alcoholic and her mother suffered from depression (History.com). Dix did what she could to take care of the household and her two other siblings (History.com). At age twelve, Dorothea Dix went to live with her grandmother in Boston (History.com). Her grandmother was wealthy and helped Dix find her passion: teaching (History.com). She had a second cousin named Edward and he wanted to help her get started by looking for suitable places to teach (faculty.webster.edu). When Dix was eighteen, he asked her to marry him, but she turned him down (faculty.webster.edu). According to Jenn Bumb, an author for faculty.webster.edu, Dorothea Dix opened schools in Boston and Worcester and gave young girls, rich and poor, a chance to have a strong education. Dix designed her own curriculum and wrote textbooks for her students (History.com). Dix devoted so much energy into her school, and when her grandmother got sick, she spent time taking care of her (History.com). In 1836, Dix dedicated so much time to helping her grandmother and working with her students that she grew tired (History.com). According to Jenn Bumb, Dorothea Dix showed symptoms of the disease we now call tuberculosis. Her doctor told her to take time off work and go on a trip (faculty.webster.edu). After pursuing her dream as a teacher for several years, she became too sick and tired to continue, so traveled to Europe…

    • 1078 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Problems such as a need for children and local health. She was a sociologist, public philosopher and a leader both in world peace and women’s suffrage. Many US citizens remember her as the social work profession founder in the…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mental institutions were places in which people could go to better themselves and the disease within their minds. But it wasn't always a great place for patients to go get help due to the poor living conditions and human rights violations. Not to mention patients weren't getting better, instead they were getting permanent damage, psychologically. It began as a process where people stayed at the hospital with 24/7 watch and people also believed in institutionalization for family whom people could no longer take care of.…

    • 487 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Dorothea Dix

    • 1331 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Dorothea Dix was brought up in a very strict religious Methodist family. So when Dorothea Dix moved with her grandmother to Boston and then with her aunt in Worcester, Massachusetts where she began to teach at age 14. After teaching for a few years in Massachusetts Dorothea Dix Move back to Boston with her grandmother and founded the Dix Mansion, a school for girls, along with a charity school that poor girls could attend for free. Soon she began to write books such as Conversations on Common Things, published in 1824. In 1841 Dorothea Dix began to teach Sunday school in East Cambridge Jail, a women’s prison. What Dorothea Dix found in the prison was very disturbing. Dorothea Dix found that some of the tattered inmates were chained in a filthy, cold cell simply because they were mentally ill. She began to document all the cruel treatment these inmates had to endure and with the help of some powerful men she convinced the legislatures with her findings to enlarge the state mental institution in Worcester and practice more gentle treatment.…

    • 1331 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays

Related Topics