Conservative Reformer

Unitarian Influence.

Dorothea Dix carried to fulfillment the ideas about social order and personal harmony advanced by Unitarianism, which an evangelical critic dubbed "the Boston religion" because it was the faith of the elites in that city but enjoyed little following anywhere else. Dix was born 4 April 1802 in Hampden, Maine. She lived at times with the family of the most famous spokesman of the Unitarian faith, minister William Ellery Channing. Although Dix received little formal education, she recognized that teaching offered the readiest outlet for advancing her ideals. Her stern methods antagonized her pupils, however, and her plans to make her mark in education crumbled.

Asylum Lobbyist.

In the 1840s Dix shifted her ideas from the schoolroom to a different institutional context, the insane asylum. Like Dix's classes, asylums providing the so-called moral treatment essentially offered a program of education that emphasized...