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Why Do We Volunteer?
A Sermon Given
by The Rev. Roger Fritts
on October 3, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
By way of trying to answer the question that I have asked in
the sermon title, I want to tell a story.
In 1841 James Nichols was studying for the Unitarian ministry
at Harvard Divinity School. When the instructors handed out the
field work assignments, they assigned Nichols the task of teaching
a Sunday School class to twenty women prisoners at the East
Cambridge House of Corrections.
One session with the women was enough to convince this
young divinity school student that he was out of his depth. A few
days after the first class Nichols sought out help from a Unitarian
woman named Dorothea Dix. Dorothea Dix was 39 years old, and
she suffered from serious health problems, but Nichols hoped she
could give him some advice. He told her his difficulty in teaching
the Bible to the women prisoners. Nichols asked Dix if she could
recommend a wise and experienced woman to take over his unruly
Sunday school. Dorothea Dix astonished Nichols by volunteering
to take over the class herself.
When John Nichols came to visit her in 1841, Dorothea Dix
was nearly forty. Unmarried, and often too weak from illness to
work as a teacher, she lived off a pension left to her by her
deceased grandmother. Because of her weak health, Nichols was
surprised when she said that she would teach the class.
The Sunday after her conversation with John Nichols, Dix
crossed the bridge over the Charles River in a carriage, and
traveled though the muddy streets of Cambridge. As she entered
the East Cambridge jail, the first thing that hit her was the strong
smell of urine in the air. The twenty women were a mixed group.
The police had imprisoned them for drunkenness, prostitution, or
stealing. Dix told them a Bible story. The faces remained indifferent or hostile. When she finished the lesson, she sang a hymn and
then she moved among the women shaking their unwashed hands
and saying, "God bless you, sister."
According to Nichols's story, just as she was about to leave,
Dorothea Dix noticed that there were several cells holding people
with mental illnesses, and that these cells had no heat. Indignantly,
she demanded an explanation. The jailer told her that fire would be
an unnecessary hazard, and besides, he said, lunatics can not tell
the difference between hot and cold. Dix could not convince the
jailer that people with mental illnesses need heat in the same way
all people need heat on a cold March day.
In the days after her visit, Dix found out the names of those
persons responsible for the jail. Because she was a woman,
society's rules did not permit her to speak formally to any of these
male officials. Nevertheless, she could present her case in writing,
and she did. She described the neglect, the lack of sanitation, the
freezing rooms, and the herding together of the people with little
consideration given to the nature of their mental illness.
The sensational details of her protest reached the newspapers
and Dix suddenly found herself in the midst of controversy. Some
accused her of being an interfering busybody. Others said that men
should not allow a woman to meddle in politics.
In spite of these attacks, she would not stop. She turned to the
Unitarian, Horace Mann, for advice. Though Horace Mann's efforts
at reform were chiefly in education, he had once headed a committee that had investigated the treatment of the insane in Massachusetts. The committee sent out letters to every town in the state
asking about how communities cared for the insane. Most towns
did not reply. What society needed, Mann told Dix, was a thorough
survey of the state, not by letter but by person. Taking up Horace
Mann's suggestion, Dix set out to visit every jail and poorhouse in
every town in Massachusetts.
In January of 1843, after two years of painstaking work,
Dorothea Dix reported to the legislators of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. The report was in writing because the legislators
would not allow a woman to make an oral presentation. It described the treatment of people with mental illnesses, including
graphic descriptions of individual cases. One of her most powerful
descriptions was of the Newburyport almshouse.
Describing her surprise visit to the facility in the summer of
1842, Dix said that at first she was relieved to find ample space for
its eighty prison inmates and comfortable conditions for its "seven
insane [and] one idiotic" inmates. However, she heard from an
attendant that there was another insane resident whom no one had
wanted her to see: "a woman in a cellar." When Dix asked to
inspect the woman's quarters, the master of the house nervously
tried to discourage her, cautioning that approaching the madwoman
was dangerous. He said, she had lately attacked his wife, and was
often naked. Undeterred, Dix replied, "If you will not go with me,
give me the keys and I will go alone." Finally, the outer doors
were opened and she entered a dark staircase. Groping her way
down, a strange, unnatural noise startled her. The noise seemed to
come from beneath her feet. When they removed the padlock on
the basement door, Dix searched the dim room, but saw nothing
until she opened a tiny door beneath the staircase. Peering in, she
was horrified. The faint light revealed "a female apparently wasted
to a skeleton, partially wrapped in blankets." Suffering, not age,
had withered the woman's face. When she saw visitors, "she
poured forth the wailing of despair." Stretching her arms to Dix in
a terrible appeal, the woman cried, "Why am I consigned to hell?
dark -- dark -- I used to pray, I used to read the Bible -- I have
done no crime in my heart; I had friends, why have all forsaken
me! -- My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"
In the previous writings by American asylum doctors and
prison reformers, nothing approached the dramatic power of this
passage. The readers accompanied the narrator as she cut through
the veneer of order and tranquility held up by the keepers of people
with mental illness and descended into a living hell. Dix's writing
style was a combination of a gothic mystery in the tradition of
Edgar Allan Poe and a sermon filled with religious images.
Although at times for dramatic effect she embellished the truth,
her writing style got results. After a debate in the Massachusetts
Legislature, during which some law makers described Dix as a liar
and a slanderer, the legislature passed a bill ordering the construction of buildings to house two hundred people with mental
illnesses.
Next Dix visited institutions in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New
York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Kentucky. She carried
her crusade to Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Missouri, Alabama,
Arkansas and Tennessee. By the spring of 1848 she had traveled
60,000 miles, stopping at 411 cities and towns and visiting more
than 9,000 people believed to have mental illnesses.
Finally in Maryland, Dix stayed with a prominent Baltimore
Unitarian minister. After a survey of our state, Dix composed what
was her last state petition. She wrote that Maryland's institutions
were inadequate to cope with the spiraling increase in the rate of
mental illness.
Dix stressed the importance of early hospitalization. She
emphasized our basic moral responsibility to insure that the
incurable were at least physically comfortable. Members of the
Maryland Assembly worried that any expenditure to help people
with mental illnesses would be unpopular among their constituents.
Officials told her that the state was simply too deeply in debt to
finance an institution. In response, Dix devoted one third of her
report to the financial value of a hospital for people with mental
illnesses. She argued that the economics of a properly managed
asylum would soon lighten the state's funding burden. In the spring
of 1851, the Maryland assembly voted funds to build a new
asylum.
A year later, in 1852, Dix convinced the United States House
and the Senate to pass a bill appropriating money to establish a
federal hospital for people with mental illnesses in the District of
Colombia. St. Elizabeth's hospital is still in operation today.
In the mid 1850s Dix traveled in Europe. In each country she
visited, she urged the construction of hospitals for people with
mental illnesses. In 1861 the War Department appointed Dix (now
fifty-nine years old), as Superintendent of Women Nurses. After
the Civil War, she returned to her work urging the construction of
hospitals, although she traveled at a slow pace. When she died in
1885 at the age of eighty-seven, Dix left an impressive record of
achievements.
In 1843 the United States had thirteen institutions for people
with mental illnesses. By 1880 this country had 123 such hospitals.
Dix had been directly involved in founding thirty-two of these and
indirectly involved in the founding of others. She could also take
credit for fifteen schools established to train persons with mental
disabilities.
All of this she did as volunteer, living on about $3,000 per
year, income from investments left to her by her grandmother. Why
did she do this? Why did she volunteer to spend half her life
building hospitals for people with mental illnesses?
Of course, we can never know all of the complex motivations
that caused Dorothea Dix to work to build these hospitals. Nevertheless, a look at the first forty years of her life gives us some
clues.
Dorothea Dix was born in 1802, the oldest in a family of three
children. Her father was an alcoholic and a fanatic Methodist
preacher. He spent much of his time away from home traveling
about New England drinking and preaching the gospel. Her mother
was a frail uneducated woman, eighteen years older than her
husband. When Dorothea was thirteen years old, her mother
became an invalid, probably because of problems related to the
birth of the family's third child. Dorothea found herself responsible
for many household chores such as cleaning and cooking. She
spent long hours sewing together the printed copies of her father's
sermons that he sold to support the family. It was not a happy
childhood.
To escape, the teenage girl ran away from home and went to
live with her grandmother in Boston. Grandmother was a stern,
upper class Yankee who had broken off all contact with her son
because he had married below his class. Life with grandmother was
almost as hard as life with her parents. One of her aunts told
Dorothea, "Your grandmother would gladly die for the sake of her
children, but nothing would betray her into the weakness of kissing
them good night!"
In 1821 Dorothea received news that her father had died, most
likely from the effects of his heavy drinking. To help focus her
energies after her father's death, Dorothea convinced her grandmother to let her turn a room in the barn behind the house into a
school. Nineteen-year-old Dorothea threw herself into the work of
creating her own one room private school.
When she was not working as a teacher, Dorothea discovered
that Boston in the 1820s was in the midst of a spiritual revolution.
A new group of liberal clergy were vigorously redefining Christianity. Called Unitarians, these ministers offered reason, optimism and
hope. It was a breath of fresh air for a young woman whose own
alcoholic father had taught her a hellfire theology. She attended
every Unitarian service she could.
The most famous of the Unitarian clergy was a man named
William Ellery Channing. When Dorothea first met Channing two
years after her biological father had died, she latched onto
Channing as a spiritual father. She first heard him speak at
Boston's Federal Street Church in 1823. Dix was twenty-one years
old and Channing was forty-three. She was in awe of both his
wisdom and his profound inner calm. He possessed the sophistication, the social status, and the self control that Dix's own father had
lacked.
- Instead of warnings of hellfire, Channing stressed the mercy of
God.
- Instead of stern demands for piety, he spoke of the beauty of
life.
- Instead of dwelling on human corruption, he talked about the
majesty and magnificence of human beings.
Channing spoke about the dignity of every person, and about
the need to reform society. "I have no fear of revolutions," he said
once. "Society ought to be troubled, to be shaken, yea, convulsed,
until its solemn debt to the poor and ignorant is paid."
Dorothea Dix adopted Channing's Unitarian philosophy as her
own. She became a close friend of Channing's family and he hired
her to be the governess of his children. She traveling with the
Channing family to Newport where they spent the summers. When
the family spent the winter of 1830 on an island in the Caribbean
she went with them.
Two aspects of Dix's early life stand out and suggest to me
why she worked as a volunteer to help people with mental
illnesses.
First, she felt an affinity for the people she saw. She grew up
in a household with an invalid mother and an alcoholic father. I
suspect she could feel empathy for the women and men locked
away in prison cells, without even proper heat, or food, or
sanitation. She could identify with their feelings of helplessness and
suffering. She could see the human being hidden in the dirt.
Second, I suspect that Dix had a strong desire to live out the values
she had learned from William Ellery Channing. She turned to
Channing for guidance and direction within two years after her
biological father died. She began her public life in 1843, sending
her report to the Massachusetts Legislature just a few months after
Channing died. I suspect each day as she worked to establish a
mental health system in America, she carried inside her the voice
of Channing, urging her on.
Why do we volunteer to help others? Of course, the answer is
complex and varies from person to person. One reason is that we
identify with the people we are helping. They remind us of
ourselves. I one asked a man, whom I was working with at soup
kitchen, why he was there. He told me that as a child in Europe
after the World War II that he himself, had gone hungry. He
vowed then that if he could ever help others who were hungry, he
would do so. Empathy is one reason we help others.
A second reason is that we volunteer to make the world a better
place to please our mothers and fathers. Or, as was the case with
Dorothea Dix, we select a teacher or a minister or someone else to
idealize and to model our lives after. We carry that person's voice
inside us, guiding us.
In my own case, I am influenced by my mother who was a
social worker and my father who worked for several years on the
staff of the public hospital in Sykesville, Maryland where he met
my mother. I carry these two voices inside me.
But also, having studied the life of Dorothea Dix, her voice
urges me on. It says that we should not be content with old
structures; we must always be willing to build new systems for a
new day. It is a dynamic voice, which I find present in me today
when I visit a nursing home, a hospital, or a prison.
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