Caroline Healey Dall

Portrait of Caroline Wells Healey Dall, ca.1872

Caroline Wells Healey Dall (June 22, 1822 – December 17, 1912) was an American feminist writer, transcendentalist, and reformer. She was affiliated with the National Women's Rights Convention, the New England Women's Club, and the American Social Science Association. Her associates included Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, as well as members of the Transcendentalist movement in Boston.

Early Life and Education

Dall was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and lived there off and on during her life. As a young woman, she received a comprehensive education, encouraged by her father to write novels and essays, and to engage in debates about religion, philosophy and politics. In addition to private tutoring, she attended a private school for girls run by educator Joseph Hale Abbot, until the age of fifteen. She married Charles Dall, a Unitarian minister who worked with the poor in Baltimore, in 1844. Her children included William Healey Dall. The two lived in Toronto during the early 1850s, and returned to Boston in 1855

Work for Women's Rights

Though she continued to write through the early years of her marriage and child-rearing, after her husband moved to Calcutta, India to perform missionary work, Dall became an active participant in the Boston Women's Rights movement. She was soon an active lecturer and writer on the topic, and organized the New England Women's Rights Convention, along with suffragist Paulina Davis. After deciding that she did not like working with groups, Dall turned to writing as her principle means of addressing women's equality. her most prominent works from this time included Historical Pictures Retouched: a Volume of Miscellanies (1861), which highlighted previously ignored women in history, and a collection of lectures entitled The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867) in which she argued that the modern woman was no longer content to be in the domestic sphere and should be allowed to participate in public life. The New York Evening Post called this collection "the most eloquent and forcible statement of the Woman's Question which has been made."

Later Life

In the late 1860s, Dall retired from the Women's Rights movement and turned her writing attention to such diverse topics as Egypt (Egypt's Place in History 1868) and the Civil War (Patty Gray's Journey, three volumes for children, 1869-70). During this time, she also moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a friend of the current first lady Frances Cleveland. Much of her later work was about the American Renaissance to which she was witness as a young woman. Works from this period include Margaret and Her Friends: Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller (1895) and Transcendentalism in New England: a Lecture (1897), given to the Society of Philosophical Inquiry at the age of 73. During this time, she also gave the occasional sermon in the Unitarian Church, one of the earliest woman to do so. In the last years of her life, she suffered greatly from arthritis, though she remained active until her death at the age of 90 on December 17, 1912.

Works

Portrait of Caroline Wells Healey Dall, by Alvan Clark, ca.1836

• Essays and Sketches, Boston: S.G. Simpkins, 1849
• Woman's Right to Labor, or, Low Wages and Hard Work: in Three Lectures, delivered in Boston, November, 1859, Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1860
• Woman's Rights Under the Law: in Three Lectures, Delivered in Boston, January, 1861, Boston: Walker, Wise and Company, 1861
• The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (Memorial ed.), Boston: Rumford Press, 1867, 1914 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee: A Kinswoman of the Pundita Ramabai, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888 (about Anandi Gopal Joshi)
• Transcendentalism in New England, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1897
• Helen R. Deese, ed. (2006), Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, 1838-1855, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, ISBN 0934909903

Further reading

• Helen R. Deese (March 1988), "Alcott's Conversations on the Transcendentalists: The Record of Caroline Dall", American Literature, vol. 60, p. 17-25 (refers to Amos Bronson Alcott)
• Myerson, Joel, ed. (1978), The American Renaissance in New England, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 1, Detroit: Gale Research Co.
• Tiffany K. Wayne (2005), Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America, Lexington Books, ISBN 0739107593
• "Dall, Caroline Wells Healey", Notable American Women, 1607-1950, Volume I: A-F, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971

External links

• Template:Worldcat id
• Works by Caroline Healey Dall at Project Gutenberg
• Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, 1811-1954 from Bryn Mawr
• Caroline Healey Dall's biography of Dr. Anandibai Joshee in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
• Papers, 1829-1956. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.