Chapter 10: Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, 1824-1840 pg 281-311 CHAPTER LEAD-IN Dorothea Dix ? 19th century New England reformer, daughter to a Methodist preacher and born into poverty in Maine she was forced to do family work as a child As a teenager ? moved to Boston what her grandmother and educated herself and embraced Unitarian religion, taught school, wrote devotional manuals and children?s stories March 1841 ? began her career as an advocate for humanitarian treatment of the mentally ill when she was teaching a religious class for women prisoners at the house of corrections in east Cambridge, Massachusetts and saw insane inmates shivering in unheated jail cells. She petitioned the courts to have stoves brought in to provide heat and won.