Caroline Wells Healey Dall papers

Caroline Wells Healey Dall, a writer, lecturer, and women's rights advocate, especially in the area of education, was born on 22 June 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts to Caroline Foster Healey and Mark Healey, who was a merchant and bank president. Dall was the oldest of eight children and attended a private girls' school in Boston run by Joseph Hale Abbot. She taught Sunday school, was a relief worker, and ran a nursery for the children of working women in Boston. In 1841, at the invitation of Elizabeth Peabody, Dall attended Margaret Fuller's weekly "Conversations" and, based on these sessions, later published Margaret and Her Friends (1895) and Transcendentalism in New England (1897). From 1842 to 1844 Dall was vice principal of a girls' school in Georgetown. While in Washington, D.C., she was also involved in efforts to provide schooling for African-Americans and contributed to an anti-slavery publication, The Liberty Bell.

On 24 September 1844, Dall married Charles Henry Appleton Dall, a Unitarian minister who was a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. They moved from Baltimore to Boston in 1845, where their son, William Healey Dall, was born that year. Their daughter, Sarah Keene Healey Dall (Munro) was born in 1849. William Healey Dall became a naturalist at the Smithsonian Institution who also worked for the U.S. Coast Survey of Alaska and the U.S. Geological Survey and published extensively on mollusks. He married Antoinette Whitney, and their son, Charles Whitney Dall, married Emily Maurice. The son of the latter couple was Charles Whitney Dall, Jr.

After one year working as a pastor in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and two years in Needham, Massachusetts, Charles Dall held a Unitarian pastorate in Toronto for four years. During that time, Caroline Dall was corresponding editor of Una, a women's journal. In 1854, the Dalls returned to Boston, and in 1855, Charles went alone to Calcutta, India as the first American Unitarian foreign missionary. He remained there, except for occasional visits to the United States, until his death in 1886.

In her husband's absence, Caroline Dall became more active in issues involving women's rights. She helped Paulina Wright Davis organize the woman's rights convention in Boston in 1855, and then in 1859, she organized and was one of the principal speakers at the New England Woman's Rights Convention in Boston. Dall was an active lecturer and teacher, and published some of her lectures, including "The College, the Market, and the Court, or Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law" in 1867. Her other writings include biographies of women, a children's book (Patty Gray's Journey to the Cotton Islands), and several autobiographical writings. She was a founding and active member (librarian, director, and vice president) of the American Social Science Association, serving on its executive committee until 1905.

In 1879, Dall moved to Washington, D.C., where her son lived, and continued writing and teaching until her death on 17 December 1912.