Publisher's Synopsis
An unhappy childhood helped Dorothea Dix to identify with society's outcasts. Like many young women of her day, she became a school teacher. Surrounded by the ferment of reform in pre-Civil War Boston but untouched by it, she was drifting towards a life of spinsterly aimlessness until one cold day in March 1841. She had volunteered to teach a Sunday school class at the jail in East Cambridge. Among the convicts, shivering in an unheated room, she found some women who were mentally ill. Why was there no stove to warm them, she demanded? Lunatics, she was told, could not feel the cold, and they would only burn themselves or set the building afire. Dorothea Dix determined to act; she had found her cause.
This book is about the Dorothea Dix Hall Association offered stability, good food, education, and the comfort of a home environment. Through the words of those closest to it, these letters reveal the brief but valuable history of this charitable organization and the fond memories it created.
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