Alice Bunker Stockham, Dress Reform, and "Karezza"

Alice Bunker Stockham (died 3 December 1912)

I first came across the name of Alice Bunker Stockham in connection with the Rational Dress Movement--a nineteenth-entury reform movement that I knew nothing about. (Which shouldn't be surprising, since, in my academic life, I was [I guess I still am] a medievalist--the nineteenth century is usually way too modern for my taste.)

Alice Bunker Stockham

Anyway, the movement to reform women's dress--to free women from the unhealthy and constrictive clothing in which they were imprisoned--began in the United States and in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, arising at the same time as and in connection with the suffrage movement.

It also involved many of the same women, including, in the United States, Sarah Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, for example.

The aims of the reformers were to free women from the dictates of fashion (which didn't--and doesn't--seem to have been successful, at least if you spend any time at all looking at the women in music videos, on the red carpet, or, for that matter, in college classrooms), but especially from the devastating physical effects of corsets and "tight lacing." 

Throughout history, western women have engaged in various ways of shaping their torsos through corsets and lacing--at the turn of the sixteenth century, in the lessons she writes for her daughter, Anne of France is already warning Suzanne about the dangers of tight-lacing, which, she says, is not only ridiculous but will damage her health! And lest you think we are way past that today, check out all the five-star Amazon reviews for this "double steel boned," heavy-duty "waist-trainer" corset--with its "26 . . . steel bones," "4 rigid steel bars," and “waist tape for waistline support."

Perhaps the most well-known name associated with the efforts to reform women's clothing is that of Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), who in 1849 introduced her trouser-like "bloomers" in order to free women from the excessive weight of their crinolines--the combined weight of a woman's skirt and petticoats meant that pounds, perhaps as many as thirteen pounds, were hanging off of a woman's waist. The development of the caged crinoline in mid-century did serve to reduce that weight (in 1857, Bloomer adopted it in favor of the garments she had devised), but that did not end the efforts to reform women's clothing. 

Despite the ridicule and hostility directed at those who had worn bloomers, a National Dress Reform Association was organized in the United States in 1856, advocating various modified, more freeing and "hygienic" dress styles for women. (Though even these reformed styles meant women were still wearing several pounds' worth of undergarments.) The group ultimately disbanded, since the idea of trousers seemed to present an insurmountable object.

But the reform movement reignited in the 1870s, principally in reaction to the introduction of the bustle, adding an iron cage and looped fabric in yet another distortion of the natural female body. In London, the Rational Dress Society was formed in 1881, promoted by Florence Pomeroy, viscountess Harberton, and the New Zealand feminist Eliza Mary King. Its stated goals:

The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health. It protests against the wearing of tightly-fitting corsets; of high-heeled shoes; of heavily-weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise almost impossible; and of all tie down cloaks or other garments impeding on the movements of the arms. It protests against crinolines or crinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming. . . . [It] requires all to be dressed healthily, comfortably, and beautifully, to seek what conduces to birth, comfort and beauty in our dress as a duty to ourselves and each other.

(For a report on King's visit to Canada and the United States in 1884, reported in the New York Times,click here--the story is found on page 5, along with other important news like "Hot Days in Saratoga," "Chicago's Summer Races," and "A Priest's Study Robbed").

Now to Alice Bunker. Born in Ohio in 1833, she was certainly an advocate for dress reform--as I said, it was in the context of the nineteenth-century dress reform movement that I first ran across her name. But, wow! Reading just a bit about her, reforming women's clothing is the least of her many efforts on behalf of women.

Alice Bunker enrolled in and graduated from Olivet College in Michigan, founded in 1844 by Congregationalists and dedicated to promoting education to students regardless of sex, race, or financial means. (It was, at first, denied accreditation because of its support of the cause of abolition.)

Bunker then attended Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati, where she earned her M.D. in 1854, the fifth woman in the United States to become a doctor. ("Eclectic medicine" was a recognized branch of American medicine that promoted botanical remedies and physical therapy.) She married G. H. Stockman in 1857, then received more training at the Chicago Homeopathic Medical College, which opened in 1876. 

In her Chicago medical practice, Stockham focused on gynecology and obstetrics. Her 1884 Tokology, a Book for Every Woman (the title, tokology, from the Greek word for "obstetrics) was a practical book for women that recommended a high-fiber diet and exercise for pregnant women, that recommended pregnant women abstain from sex (such "continence" is good for their health), and that denounced women's corsets. 

Stockham acknowledged women's natural sexuality and denounced the sexual double standard:

When woman only is taught that virtue is the brightest jewel in her crown, when the popular verdict is that womanliness and modesty are synonymous for repression, when she lives in fear of maternity and believes restraint on her part prevents vitality of life germs, when, too, erroneous habit pervert every function, how can we tell what is natural for her?

Then, on the other hand, when man is taught that virtue is not synonymous with manliness, when the passions are stimulated by unnatural habits of living, by impure conversation, thoughts, books and practices, can we say this strength of passion is purely natural and healthy?

Stockham was also an advocate of masturbation as healthy for both men and women.

Stockham distributed her privately printed book to poor women and to prostitutes in order to promote their well-being and, if possible, to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Each copy of her book came with a certificate that entitled a woman to a free gynecological exam at Stockham's clinic. Stockham's book was translated into French, Finnish, German, and Russian (with a preface by Leo Tolstoy).

Her book also included lots of practical advice for women, including recipes, patterns for baby clothing, and lists of items necessary for childbirth, including an "abundant supply" of soft rags, "large and clean," as well as "two yards of rubber cloth for protecting the bed, a fountain syringe, a hot water bottle, safety pins, antiseptic, absorbent cotton, glycerine, arnica, ammonia, carbolic and castile soap, calenduline, olive oil and cosmoline."

In 1896, she published Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (the title, karezza, from the Italian word for carezza, "caress"), in which she laid out "a theory of conjugal life, in which there is a love communion between husband and wife from which results a mastery of the physical": "Karezza signifies 'to express affection in both words and action,' and while it fittingly denotes the union that is the outcome of deepest human affection, love's consummation, it is used technically throughout this work to designate a controlled sexual union." It is not a matter of self-control, but of mutual control. Karezza did not necessarily result in orgasm ("Unless procreation is desired, let the final propagative orgasm be entirely avoided"); rather, the goal was sexual desire and pleasure.

Stockham developed her ideas after a trip to India and her own study of Tantric sex. The goals of karezza, as she devised her plan, were to help women control their reproduction without mechanical methods of birth control, to promote women's equality (women were not to be reduced to passive objects who had to submit to their husbands' sexual desires), and to result in marital pleasure and fidelity.

In 1905, when Stockham was seventy-two years old, she was arrested on obscenity charges by Anthony Comstock, the U.S. Postal Inspector.* Under the Comstock Law, passed in 1873, 

whoever, within the District of Columbia or any of the Territories of the United States . . . shall sell . . . or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section . . . can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in any wise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof in any court of the United States... he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.

Under this law, Comstock pursued all those who, like Stockham, distributed any kind of material about reproductive health--even anatomy books could be kept from distribution by mail.

Although she was defended by no less an advocate that Clarence Darrow, Stockham was convicted and fined, her books were banned, and the publishing house she had established was forced to close. 

  

Although Stockham did not promote the use of contraceptives, her theory of karezza was condemned in a series of letters and attacks by the Catholic church, culminating in the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office's 30 June 1952 monitum, or "solemn warning," published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which condemned what it called "a reserved embrace."

The Sacred Congregation forbade the faithful to practice and priests and spiritual directors even to suggest that "a reserved embrace" was acceptable. Karezza was condemned because promoted “hedonism outside of a true marriage act." 

For an account of women's clothing and the efforts to "reform" it, the topic that drew me to Alice Bunker Stockham in the first place, I recommend Patricia Cunningham's Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art.

*Update, 30 July 2023: For Grace Haley's informative piece on the Comstock Act and the way it is being deployed by forced-birth activists and politicians today, here is a link to the essay, published at Jessica Valenti's Abortion, Every Day.

Lucretia Mott, American Activist

Lucretia Coffin Mott (died 11 November 1880)

I have mentioned Lucretia Mott's name in this blog more times than any other--you can click on the label "Lucretia Mott," below, to see where and when her name has come up in the last eleven months.  

Born on Nantucket Island in 1793, Lucretia Coffin Mott would play an integral part in key social movements for more than fifty years. 

In 1804, Lucretia Coffin entered a Quaker boarding school in New York, where she became a follower of Elias Hicks, an abolitionist. She would eventually become a teacher at the school, where she learned that women were paid less than men. And while at the Nine Partners school she met and married a fellow teacher, James Mott, in 1811.

By 1821, she had become a Quaker minister, speaking out on behalf of reform within the Society of Friends. She also became increasingly public in her opposition to slavery. But however close she became to abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, she had to face the reality that women were formally excluded from abolitionists groups. So, in 1833, she became one of the founders of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1837, as we have seen, she helped to organize the First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women--along with women like Angelina and Sarah Grimké, she addressed audiences of men and women, and for all these women, speaking "promiscuously" caused a great deal of public opposition. Two further conventions followed, one in 1838 and another in 1839. There was so much opposition--not only were women organizing and speaking, but the convention was integrated, including black and white women and men--that a mob rioted and destroyed Pennsylvania Hall during the 1838 convention.

In 1840, Mott attended the international World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, one of six female delegates--the male delegates, however, opposed opening up their convention to women and voted to exclude their participation, so Mott was recognized only as a visitor, not a delegate. While there, Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another unseated woman delegate, decided that, on their return to the United States, they would organize a convention for women's rights. Their decision culminated, eight years later, in the Seneca Falls Convention. 

Mott spent the rest of her life advocating for the social causes she believed in. A committed pacifist, she opposed war with Mexico and the Civil War, attended meetings of the New England Non-Resistance Society, and was vice president of the Universal Peace Union, founded in 1866. In 1870, she was elected president of the Philadelphia Peace Society.

She attempted to heal the breach between suffragists after the Civil War, when the question of whether black men should gain the vote before women did, fractured the movement. 

She was elected the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, advocating for universal suffrage. Along with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she helped to create the National Women Suffrage Association. 

In 1876, at the time of the American Centennial, she presided at the National Women Association meeting in Philadelphia; two years later, she was at the thirtieth-anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention.

In assessing the totality of Lucretia Mott's life and work, Nancy Unger writes, "Lucretia Mott spoke frequently on the underlying unity of the various reforms she advocated": 

Mott refused to claim the moral superiority of women but was instead dedicated to achieving equality for all of America's disadvantaged and disenfranchised, including Indians, women, slaves, and free blacks. Increasingly libertarian in her religious interpretations, Mott grew to believe that a new spirit was at work in the world that demanded active involvement in reform. An enormously inspirational speaker and a tireless organizer, Lucretia Mott was one of her country's earliest, and most radical, feminists and reformers.

For Unger's essay, for American National Biography Online, click here (unfortunately, subscription is needed for access). For Mott's biography at the National Women's Hall of Fame, click here, and for the entry on Mott at the National Women's History Museum, click here.

There are several full-length biographies, but I like Carol Faulkner's biography of this "radical egalitarian": Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America.

Lydia Maria Child, Social Reformer and Political Activist

Lydia Maria Francis Child (died 20 October 1880)

Born on 11 February 1802, Lydia Francis should be remembered today for much more than her "Over the River and Through the Woods" Thanksgiving poem.*

Lydia Maria Child, 1870

The daughter of David Convers Francis and Susannah Rand, Lydia Francis was educated at home in Medford, Massachusetts, then at a local "dame school"--a private school where girls received a primary-level education and "necessary" female skills like sewing and embroidery--and, then, at a women's seminary. (By contrast, her brother got a Harvard education.)

After her mother's death, Lydia was sent to live with a sister and trained to be a teacher. The years she spent with her sister in Maine also introduced her to an impoverished community of Abenaki and Penobscot Indians, awakening in her an awareness of the dire situation faced by Native American peoples. 

After a brief stint at teaching, she moved back to Massachusetts. At age nineteen, she renamed herself "Maria" (she didn't like the name Lydia) and began her real education with her brother, who introduced her to Homer and Milton and challenged her to write.

Her first novel, Hobomak: A Tale of Early Times, was completed in six weeks and published in 1824--set in Salem, it told the story of a young Puritan woman who scandalized her family and community by marrying an Indian, with whom she had a child. (Double scandal--the novel's heroine later married a second time, an Episcopalian!) The novel's themes, which challenged racial and religious views, ensured its success and Francis's celebrity. Lydia Maria Francis was just twenty-two.

In 1824 Maria Francis also opened a school and, two years later, began publication of a bi-monthly magazine for children, Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in the United States. She would continue to write and publish--novels, biographies, poetry, guides to housekeeping and child-rearing, and histories--throughout her lifetime. 

In 1828 she married David Lee Child, a man whose political and social activism corresponded with and extended her own. By 1831 she was involved with the abolition movement. Perhaps her most significant work was published in 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a history of slavery in the United States.

She joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, working alongside Lucretia Mott, and in 1840 became the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In her anti-slavery fiction, like the novel The Quadroons, published in 1842, ten years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, she exposed the realities of slavery to those who did not read anti-slavery pamphlets or anti-slavery periodicals. Child also edited Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first published in 1861.

Nor did she forget her interest in the plight of the American Indians. She detailed white atrocities against native populations in The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets: As Related by a Mother to Her Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth (1829) and, still working on the issue forty years later, An Appeal for the Indians (1868).

Her work in the abolition movement also involved her in the struggle for women's rights. Although she published a number of books for women that focused on domesticity (she published The Frugal Housewife the year after she married), she also wrote to support women's equality. 

In addition to publishing a series of biographies of notable women, her two-volume The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations was published in 1835, then revised and republished ten years later as Brief History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. Her Letters from New York, also filling two volumes, included editorials on the topic of women's rights. As she argued, 

That the present position of women in society is the result of physical force is obvious enough; whosoever doubts it, let her reflect why she is afraid to go out in the evening without the protection of a man. What constitutes the danger of aggression? Superior physical strength, uncontrolled by the moral sentiments. If physical strength were in complete subjection to moral influence, there would be no need of outward protection. That animal instinct and brute force now govern the world, is painfully apparent in the condition of women everywhere. . . . 

This sort of politeness to women is what men call gallantry--an odious word to every sensible woman because she sees that it is merely the flimsy veil which foppery throws over sensuality to conceal its grossness. So far is it from indicating sincere esteem and affection for women, that the profligacy of a nation may, in general, be fairly measured by its gallantry. This taking away rights and condescending to grant privileges is an old trick of the physical force principle, and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises an ugliness which would otherwise be abhorred. The most inveterate slaveholders are probably those who take most pride in dressing their household servants handsomely and who would be most ashamed to have the name of being unnecessarily cruel. And profligates, who form the lowest and most sensual estimate of women, are the very ones to treat them with an excess of outward deference. . . .

Along with Lucretia Mott, she knew and worked with women we have met before, including Angelina Grimké and Margaret Fuller. 

Many of Child's works are available online through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. There is a detailed biographical essay posted at The Poetry Foundation website--Deborah Clifford's biography is followed by an extended bibliography of primary sources and a great list of material for further reading, including biographies of Lydia Maria Child.

*Written for Thanksgiving and published in her 1844 collection of children's verse, Flowers for Children, the poem was set to music by an unknown composer and is now commonly regarded as a Christmas song.

Elizabeth Fry, the "Angel of Prisons"

Elizabeth Gurney Fry (died 12 October 1845)

Elizabeth Gurney was born on 21 May 1780, the daughter of parents who were both members of prominent banking families--her father, John Gurney, was a partner in Gurney's Bank (headquartered in Norwich), her mother, Catherine Bell, was related to the Barclay family, founders of Barclay's. (Gurney's merged into Barclay's Bank in 1896.) 

Elizabeth Gurney Fry, c. 1823

The Gurneys were socially aware Quakers, and when Elizabeth Gurney was a young girl, she accompanied her mother on relief visits to the poor and sick. 

Later, she became friendly with the Norwich writer and activist Amelia Alderson (Opie), and in the Alderson home was introduced to the thinking of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. After she heard the preaching of a visiting American Quaker, William Savery, Elizabeth Gurney expanded her interests, helping in a number of local charities, including efforts to teach poor children to read.

Married to Joseph Fry in 1800 (he also belonged to a prominent banking family), Elizabeth Gurney Fry moved to London, became a Quaker minister, and bore eleven children.

In London she met Stephen Grellet (originally Étienne de Grellet du Mabillier), a French Catholic who had converted to Quakerism and become involved in missionary work throughout America and Europe. In addition, Grellet was especially interested in prison conditions. In 1812, at the prompting of Grellet, who had been shocked after a visit to Newgate, Fry herself visited the prison.

Although circumstances in her own life were difficult--including births of two more children and the death of her four-year-old daughter--Fry dedicated herself to prison reform. By 1816, she was making regular visits to the prison, working to ameliorate the conditions of the prisoners, attempting to raise funds for educating the prisoners, and, ultimately, helping to establish the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate, a committee that organized a school for the children of female inmates, hired a matron to oversee the incarcerated women, and developed programs for the women to produce goods for sale in order to buy provisions that would improve their living conditions.

Newgate Prison
(the prison was closed in 1902 and demolished in 1904)

In 1818, Elizabeth Fry became the first woman to give evidence for a House of Commons committee when she testified before a committee investigating London prisons. A year later, in 1819, she published Prisons in Scotland and the North of England, and in 1825, Observations of the Siting, Superintendence and Government of Female Prisoners.

From Prisons in Scotland and
the North of England

In addition to her work with prison reform, Fry was concerned about the homeless--after seeing a child who had died on the streets of London, she established "night shelters" in London. She helped to set up "visiting societies," volunteers who would seek out the poor and ill in their homes in order to offer aid, and she established a nursing school, said to have inspired Florence Nightingale. 

And Fry was widely criticized, too--for having neglected her duties as a wife and mother.

Fry died at the age of sixty-five, on 12 October 1845.

There are biographies of Elizabeth Fry, including one recently published, but it's hard to find one that isn't hagiographic or simplistic. I recommend June Rose's Elizabeth Fry--it's out of print, but you can easily find used copies. 

Update, 3 October 2020: The Forum, a program of the BBC's World Service, has just produced an episode on Elizabeth Fry--click here, to listen.

Jane Addams, Reformer and Activist

Jane Addams (born 6 September 1860)

It's astonishing just to list the many roles of Jane Addams: social worker, social reformer, and co-founder of Hull House; teacher and member of Chicago's Board of Education; international peace activist; women's rights and suffrage activist; philosopher; and lecturer and writer.

Jane Addams, c. 1910-1915

In 1931, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Jane Addams and Nicholas Murray Butler. Addams was recognized for her role as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization she founded in 1919. The Nobel committee also noted her role in helping the poor and, in particular, her efforts in relationship to child labor and for her aid to immigrants at Hull House.

One of Jane Addams's long-time partners was Ellen Gates Starr, whom she met when they both attended the Rockford Female Seminar in Rockford, Illinois. Although Jane Addams is better known as the founder of Hull House, the settlement house project was co-founded with Starr, both of them inspired by their trip to Europe and, in particular, their contact with the English settlement-house movement.

Addams's most enduring intimate relationship was with Mary Rozet Smith, with whom she had a thirty-year committed partnership. For Jennifer Brandel’s excellent article on their relationship, click here. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum recently included a Gender and Sexuality Tour, addressing the question, "Was Jane Addams a Lesbian?" (You may also appreciate this interview on Addams and Hull House education programs, including the LGBTQ+ tour.)

Jane Addams died on 21 May 1935, a year after Smith's death.

Some of the best information about Addams is available through the Nobel website, including a biographical essay, complete bibliography, a photo gallery, and links to useful online resources (click here).

Hull House

Dorothea Dix: Social Reformer

Dorothea Lynde Dix (died 17 July 1887)

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, on 4 April 1802. Her father, Joseph Dix, is variously reported as a religious fanatic, an "itinerant Methodist preacher," and an abusive alcoholic--although I suppose he could well have been all three. It's not exactly an either/or proposition. Her mother, Mary Bigelow Dix, is also described as an alcoholic and a depressive.

Dorothea Dix, c. 1850-55

Whatever the problems of her parents, Dorothea, the eldest of three children, found herself caring for her younger siblings, two brothers. About her role in the unhappy household she would later write, "I never knew childhood."

Her father did teach her to read and write, however, and she attended school. During the War of 1812, the family moved to Vermont, then afterwards, when Dorothea was about twelve, the household relocated to Worcester, Massachusetts.

By this point, her parents proved so incapable that Dorothea and her brothers were taken in by Joseph Dix's mother, a wealthy Bostonian who provided stability and hoped to turn Dorothea into a lady; when Mrs. Dix encountered a little resistance, Dorothea was sent back to Worcester to live with her grandmother's sister, where she would remain for the next few years.

It was at this point that a cousin, Edward Bangs, encouraged her to open a school for girls, a "dame school"; girls could not attend public schools, but they could enroll in private schools and be taught by women. In 1816, then, when Dorothea was just fifteen, she opened a school for twenty girls between the ages of six and eight.

Three years later, feeling pressured by Edward Bangs, who had declared his love for her, Dorothea closed her school and moved back to Boston with her grandmother. There she formulated a plan to open two kinds of "schools," both in the Dix Mansion--one for wealthy girls, and another, a charity school poor girls who could attend for free. While expecting opposition from her grandmother, she received instead her support, and the school was opened. 

The school(s) remained open from 1822 to 1836, despite Dix's own ill health which often required breaks from her teaching duties. She also began to write, publishing textbooks and and devotional books for children, including Conversations on Common Things (1824), Meditations for Private Hours (1828), The Garland of Flora (1829) and American Moral Tales for Young Persons (1832).

Dix's ongoing health problems forced her to close her schools in 1836, and, at the advice of her doctors, she took what was to be a recuperative trip to England with friends. She returned to the U.S. in 1837, following the deaths, in rapid succession, of both her mother and grandmother.  

Her inheritance from her grandmother left her comfortably well off. Dorothea Dix returned to England and found her life transformed. Her friendship with the Rathbone family introduced her to the philosophy and campaign of British "lunacy reform" (as it was called), men and women investigating the conditions of madhouses and asylums and working toward change in the care for those who were mentally ill. 

She transferred the work of the lunacy reform movement to America when she returned in 1840. She began teaching Sunday school in a Cambridge prison. After conducting an investigation into the "prisons and almshouses," the "jails and asylums" for the poor, she issued a report, Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, detailing the deplorable conditions she found and to "present the strong claims of suffering humanity." The abuses she details in thirty brief pages are appalling. 

Her researches moved beyond the commonwealth of Massachusetts, eventually extending through all the states east of the Mississippi. She helped in the founding, reforming, or enlarging of thirty-two mental hospitals, fifteen schools for the mentally disabled, a school for the blind, and training facilities for nurses in the states of Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Dix Hill Asylum, 1872,
Raleigh, North Carolina

Dix spent six years, between 1848 and 1854, lobbying for the U.S. Congress to pass the Bill for the Benefit of the Indigent Insane; this legislation was intended to create the facilities and provide funds for the long-term care of the "indigent insane" (a plan that included a request that millions of acres of federal land [accounts differ] be set aside to provide for the mentally ill and for the "blind, deaf, and dumb"). The bill passed Congress but was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce.

When that bill failed, Dix spent the next two years in Europe, continuing the campaign for reforming the ways the mentally ill were treated--she traveled to England, Scotland, France, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Germany before returning to the United States to continue her campaign.

During the Civil War, Dix was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union forces (she was appointed rather than the physician Elizabeth Blackwell), in charge of setting up field hospitals, recruiting nurses (she mandated that they be "plain-looking"), managing supplies, and setting up training programs. She was not particularly successful in this role, and she would later consider her war-time activities to be a failure, although her dedication to nursing both Union and Confederate soldiers earned her an enduring respect by those whom she treated.

After the war, she continued her role as a social reformer, though she contracted malaria in 1870, which weakened her considerably. Dorothea Dix lobbied for reform until her death in 1887 at the New Jersey State Hospital, Morris Plains, New Jersey--the first hospital to be built as a result of her efforts, some forty years earlier. She was eighty-five years old. 

Andrew Wood's excellent biographical essay on Dorothea Dix is available through American National Biography Online, which you can access by clicking here.  This essay includes a bibliography, but there are several newer volumes about Dix currently available, including one for children. 

Update, 1 April 2017: I recommend Gil Troy's excellent essay, "Meet Dorothea Dix, the Mother of Health Care Reform," as a timely comment on Dorothea Dix:

If today, in the twenty-first century, Americans are starting to consider free national health care as a basic right, it’s only because in the twentieth century Americans started considering every individual’s welfare a governmental responsibility. That assumption first required a nineteenth-century compassionate revolution, wherein Americans started taking on fellow citizens’ suffering as a communal concern—and feeling the national responsibility for everyone’s health that Dorothea Dix nurtured.

Clara Barton, "Angel of the Battlefield"

Clara Barton (died 12 April 1912)

Born on Christmas Day in 1821, Clarissa Harlowe Barton--who preferred to be called Clara--was an active professional woman throughout her life. 

Clara Barton, c. 1865,
photographed by Matthew Brady

Barton's first career was as a teacher; beginning in 1838, she taught in various schools for twelve years, where she demanded--and received--wages equal to those of male teachers. In 1852, after two years of academic work at the Clinton Liberal Institute, she opened a school of her own in Bardentown, the first "free" school in New Jersey. (As a free school, there were no fees assessed students--the school was paid for by the public.) 

Frustrated by a board that hired a man to run the school (because it was inappropriate for a woman to hold an administrative position), Barton turned to a new career--in 1855, she moved to Washington D.C. and went to work for the U.S. Patent Office--at first she worked as a recording clerk and was paid the same wages as her male colleagues. But because of opposition to a woman holding a "man's" job and receiving a "man's" salary, Barton's position was reduced and, in 1857, she and other female employees were dismissed. 

Barton returned to Washington and the patent office after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. But she entered into the profession for which she is most well known during the Civil War, where she gained permission in 1862 to do more than just send bandages to the front lines (a typical, though essential, job for women, who organized themselves into societies to provide supplies for soldiers and to do some caring for the sick and wounded). Barton became a nurse on the front lines of battle, working in a number of field hospitals.

In 1865, after the end of the war, Barton set up the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, where she received the queries from the family and friends about missing loved ones; by the time the office was closed, she had responded to more than 60,000 letters and helped to locate information about 22,000 missing men. She also helped in setting up a cemetery at Andersonville Prison, a notorious prison of war camp in Georgia.

During a trip to Europe in 1869, Barton was introduced to the International Red Cross and worked under its auspices in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. After she returned to the United States, Barton began her efforts to create an American branch of the Red Cross. She was ultimately successful, and she became the first president of the newly formed American Red Cross in 1881. She led the organization for the next twenty-three years.

During these years she also worked as a superintendent for a woman's "reformatory prison" (in Massachusetts) and gave speeches on behalf of women's suffrage (she was a friend of Susan B. Anthony), not only attending suffrage rallies but also giving speeches.

Clara Barton in 1904,
as she ended her term as president of
the American Red Cross

Barton published her own accounts of the Red Cross in two separate volumes, The Red Cross In Peace and War (1898) and The Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work (1904). She published an autobiography, The Story of My Childhood, in 1907.

Barton's home in Glen Echo, Maryland, where she lived for the last fifteen years of her life, is now a National Historic Site. You can take a virtual tour, access biographical material and timelines, see full transcripts of primary-source documents, and download a variety of images, including the ones used in this post, by clicking here.

Although there are many biographies of Barton written for children, there seems to be no recent full-length biography for adult readers. Copies of Elizabeth Brown Pryor's Clara Barton, Professional Angel (1987) are still in available, however. Stephen B. Oates's work on Barton during the Civil War is also available: A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (1994). In addition to the information available via the Clara Barton National Historic Site web page (above), there is an excellent entry at the American Red Cross website.

For information about Barton's Office of Missing Men, click here. 

The Clara Barton National Historic Site

Susan B. Anthony, Founding Mother

Susan B. Anthony (born 15 February 1820)

Abolitionist, suffragist, and social reformer, Susan Brownell Anthony campaigned tirelessly for the betterment of others. Early in her life, she was involved with her family's anti-slavery and temperance activities. She began her work on behalf of women's rights after she met Elizabeth Cady in 1851. She worked for more than fifty years to secure the vote for women--when she died on 13 March 1906, there was still more than a decade ahead for the campaign for women's suffrage.

In my last year of teaching, I listened as a young woman explained why she hadn't been in class for a week, why she didn't have her assignments complete, and why she couldn't possibly finish her work when it was due. 

"I have activism fatigue," she said. Her participation in various campus "social justice activities" meant she was just so tired and run down she had to take a break and rest. She thought her excuse was good.

It was not.

When I heard it, I thought about Susan B. Anthony's lifetime dedication and lifelong service.

She never quit work to complain that she suffered from "activism fatigue."

A tribute to Anthony: Women leave
"I voted" stickers on her tombstone

Angela Davis: Activist, Academic, Author

Angela Davis (born 26 January 1944)

Angela Davis in an iconic 1969 photo

Today is the birthday of Angela Davis, political activist, university professor, advocate for prison reform, lecturer, and cultural critic. Angela Davis has retired from her teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she continues her efforts to reform what she has identified as the “prison industrial complex.”