Background
Caroline Wells Healey was born on June 22, 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, the daughter of Mark Healey, a merchant and investor, and Caroline Foster. She was the first of eight children.
educator reformer author transcendentalist
Caroline Wells Healey was born on June 22, 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, the daughter of Mark Healey, a merchant and investor, and Caroline Foster. She was the first of eight children.
Her father made sure that his daughter Caroline received an outstanding education through private schools and tutors. As a result, Dall learned five foreign languages before she was twenty, and she wrote philosophical religious essays that were published in periodicals while she was still only a teenager.
Dall was more interested in religion and working with the underprivileged. At age 15, she started one of the first nursery schools for working mothers in Boston. At 19, a year before her father went bankrupt, she was invited to participate in Margaret Fuller 's public conversations, which awakened her latent feminist sensibilities, and which she later wrote about in her book Margaret Fidler and Her Friends (1895). Dall became the principal of Miss English's School in 1842, and served in that post until 1844, when she married.
Although Caroline Dall's primary confidante and friend was her father, her marriage represented a rebellion against him in that he had pushed her to pursue a literary career, and she was more drawn to a religious life of service. During the mid-1840s, Dall taught religion classes, and even ministered to her husband's congregation. She also participated in an underground railroad that enabled many slaves to escape into Canada, and she contributed articles to the Liberty Bell, an anti-slavery publication.
After her husband's death she was forced to support herself and her children on her own, and so she turned her full energies on her writing career. Though much of her early written work, such as the book Essays and Sketches (1849), was largely concerned with religious philosophy, Dall, along with Pamela Wright Davis, helped to organize women's rights conventions in Boston in 1855 and 1859. Dall also became the co-editor of the women's periodical Una during this time period. She supplemented her income by taking on boarders and giving lectures.
Though her lectures were rich in content, her speaking style was unimpressive. Therefore, her writings had a great deal more impact than her speeches. Her most acclaimed and influential book, The College, the Market, and the Court; or, Women's Relation to Education, Politics, and the Law, was drawn from a synthesis of several of her speeches. This book, appearing in 1867, was the very first collection of feminist essays of this type. As such, it signaled a new era in American feminism.
In 1865, Dall co-founded the American Social Science Association (ASSA), a social reform organization that had a formative influence in the Progressive Era. Dall served as ASSA's director from 1865 through 1880.
She died in Washington, D.C., in 1912.
Caroline was certain that women were, by and large, at least as capable and intelligent as men, and that women had a natural right to the same opportunities in life that men had. Dall was particularly concerned that women should have access to a full education and career options. Unlike many other suffragists of her time, she was much less concerned about the right to vote. Dall was convinced that the lack of professional avenues for women had reduced many thousands of women to prostitution and poverty, and she impugned the complacency of comfortable, middle-class women just as much as she blamed men.
Dall called for "free, untrammelled access to all fields of labor" for women, and she urged women not to settle for any of the various forms of comfortable dependency offered by patriarchal society, but rather to seek independence through education and work.
In speeches, Dall hotly refuted the theory of Dr. Edward H. Clarke that women were of too delicate a constitution to tolerate the rigors of an education.
Quotations:
"Let us candidly confess our indebtedness to the needle. How many hours of sorrow has it softened, how many bitter irritations calmed, how many confused thoughts reduced to order, how many life-plans sketched in purple!"
"There is, between the sexes, a law of incessant reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when He permits brothers and sisters to nestle about the same hearthstone. Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis."
"Influence follows close upon the heels of character; and whatever we are, that we shall in the end be acknowledged to be."
"I have no two separate moral standards for the sex."
Dall was a somewhat controversial figure even with the feminists of her time because she placed very little emphasis on the right to vote. She was a shy and halting speaker, her social skills were not strong, and the only person with whom she could share a deep rapport was her father. Still, her feminism became much more pronounced after her husband's departure.
Caroline was a forceful and idiosyncratic personality, and never let the sickness deter her in her quest to enlighten the world with what she knew was the right opinion.
Physical Characteristics: Dall's health was fragile and she battled sickness a great deal of her life. She often feared that her life would be cut short by disease, yet she never let this stop her from working passionately to further the causes she knew were right. Despite her episodic bouts with illness, Dall lived to be ninety years old.
Caroline married Charles Dall, a Unitarian minister who worked with the poor in Baltimore, in 1844. They had two children.