Asylum Reform with Respect to Social Reform in Antebellum America
In the Social Reform sub unit for Antebellum America, the other two topics are the Second Great Awakening and Public Education reform. Similarly to the many people of the 1820s and 30s, Dix was influenced by the religious upheavals of the Second Great Awakening. She, like many, contemplated about religion; she began to believe in the more rational ideology that was embraced by Boston's Unitarians, as opposed to the emotional religiosity that she grew up with. These morals influenced her actions, especially as she tried to convince many men of each state's legislature to accept her proposals using evidence she collected from jails and poorhouses.
The Public Education Movement was led by Horace Mann; he was the first to create a board of education. Dorothea Dix began to teach young girls when she was fourteen years old, and began a school of her own at age nineteen, where she created the curriculum and taught the students herself. Along with the mental hospitals Dix had founded, she also established fifteen schools for the feeble minded, and a school for the blind. Horace Mann and Dorothea Dix met as well, when she first began on her mission to help the insane, along with abolitionist Charles Sumner, and Samuel Howe; all three men were known as "the three horsemen of reform."
In the end, both Dorothea Dix and Horace Mann supported the spread of education, and both had a personal role in doing so.