By Yihe (Flora) Zhu, Class of 2026

Editor’s Note: History Fellowship is a course in which students conduct independent, college-level historical research on a topic of their choice with close faculty mentorship. This paper was selected as one of the seven strongest from this year’s course.

Here is how the story goes: upon leaving church one day in 1841, a young lady named Dorothea Lynde Dix, then a schoolteacher at a private girls’ school in Boston, overheard the conversation of two gentlemen. The exact details of the conversation remain unclear, but it largely revolved around the horrors that inmates at the East Cambridge House of Correction were experiencing. Upon hearing of this dire situation, Miss Dix felt compelled to investigate the matter herself and visited the institution. There, she witnessed several insane persons crowded together in an unkept and unheated cellar. From that moment on, she began her life’s work of improving the condition of these mentally burdened persons.

Click here to continue reading:A Traditional Revolutionary: Progress and Constraint in Womanhood, Madness, and the Life and Work of Dorothea Dix