Dorothea Dix Thesis

In Hampden, Maine on April 4, 1802, Dorothea Lynde Dix came into this world. Joseph Dix, her father was a pious man who sometimes had outbursts of depression. So did her mother, but hers were more frequent and lasted for a much longer time. Even though her early years were cluttered by difficulty and inconsistency with her parents’ depression and alcoholism, she persevered and helped her siblings by doing whatever their parents could not. At the age of 12, Dix moved to live with her grandmother who was quite wealthy and mentally healthy in Boston. Sometime after that, she moved to live with her aunt where she began to teach. 1819 was the year Dix moved back to Boston and founded the Dix Mansion, a school for girls, also she created a charity school for poor girls to attend for free. At these schools, she created her own curriculum and taught many of the classes that were …show more content…
Since she visited that facility, she realized the erroneous behaviors towards the inmates who stayed in that prison. The women that stayed there were flogged, chained, starved, caged, physically and sexually abused. Because she saw these things happening at this establishment, she decided the go to every public and private building that were considered “asylums” and “almshouses” that she could enter and report what she saw to tell the people of the Massachusetts legislation about the atrocities running through their systems. Not only did she look at the American asylums, she also continued in Europe. She told the legislature by mentioning a few names of cities and saying what she had seen at those prisons/asylums. For example, in Concord, Dorothea saw a woman that should have been in a hospital in a cage in one of their almshouses. In Medford, she saw a mentally ill patient chained up and she also saw a person confined in a small stall whom had been there for 17

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