| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Brown. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. (Harvard Historical Studies, number 127.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 422. $35.00.

Thomas J. Brown's biography of Dorothea Dix is a revealing portrait of the iconoclastic reformer who in promoting herself and her program to transform the care of the mentally ill became one of the best-known women in nineteenth-century America. Brown has produced a readable, well-researched biography that follows Dix's life in a straightforward manner, offering valuable insights into a person who by her early twenties was bent on carving out a public career and leading life as a woman alone. 1

The product of a middle-class Boston upbringing but alienated from her own family, Dix charted a pattern—repeated throughout her life—of finding surrogate families to fulfill her needs for nurturance and guidance. She made mentors of some of Boston's leading Unitarian intellectuals including William Ellery Channing, Horace Mann, and Samuel Gridley Howe. Although torn between a desire for a home life and an evident discomfort with familial duties, Dix allowed her personal bonds to languish as she sought work in boarding schools and almshouses and, at the age of forty, began a remarkable career campaigning throughout the country and the world on behalf of the "incurably insane." . . .

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