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from Robert McHenry, Famous American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from Colonial Times to the Present [New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1980] p. 91

      Caroline Wells Healey Dall 1822-1912, author and reformer. Born in Boston on June 22, 1822, Caroline Healey was of a well-to-do family and received an unusually thorough education. She was from an early age a serious-minded woman and as early as thirteen began contributing essays on religious and moral topics to various periodicals. She also taught Sunday school, did relief work among the poor, and from 1837 to 1842 conducted a nursery school for children of working mothers. At nineteen she was invited to participate in Margaret Fuller's series of public "conversations." She served as vice-principal of a girls' school in Georgetown, D. C. , from 1842 until her marriage in September 1844 to the Rev. Charles H. A. Dall of Baltimore. Over the next several years she accompanied him to Boston, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Toronto, and following his severe illness in 1854, back to Boston. In 1855 he became the first Unitarian missionary to India, and they lived thereafter apart. During their decade together Mrs. Dall had taught, lectured, and occasionally preached, and she had been a corresponding editor of Paulina Wright Davis' women's-rights monthly, Una. In 1849 she helped Davis organize a women's-rights convention in Boston, and in 1859 she organized the new England Woman's Rights Convention. A series of lectures on women in history was published as Historical Pictures Retouched, 1860, and a second series, on women's changing and future role in the economic system, was published as The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman's Relations to Education, Labor, and Law, 1857. Temperamentally unsuited for public leadership, she devoted herself thereafter mainly to writing. Among her books were Woman's Right to Labor, 1860, Egypt's Place in History, 1868, Patty Gray's Journey to the Cotton Islands, a three-volume children's book, 1869-1870, The Romance of the Association; or, Our Last Glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton, 1875, My First Holiday; or, Letters Home from Colorado, Utah, and California, 1881, What We Really Know About Shakespeare, 1886, Sordello - a History and a Poem, 1886, Barbara Fritchie - a Study, 1892, Transcendentalism in New England, 1987, Alongside, a privately printed memoir of her childhood, 1900, Nazareth, 1903, and Fog Bells, 1905. She also wrote biographies of Dr. Marie Zakrewska in 1860 and Dr. Anandafai Joshee in 1888. In 1865 she was a founder of the American Social Science Association, of which she was a director from 1865 to 1880 and a vice-president form 1880 to 1905. From 1879 she lived in Washington, D. C., where for many years she conducted in her home a class in literature and morals. She died in Washington, D. C., on December 17, 1912.

For More Information

      "Woman's Right to Labor," or, Low Wages and Hard Work (page images at MOA)

      Worcester Women's History Project

      Archive at Bryn Mawr College Library

Return to Women's History Month 2002 Table of Contents

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