Author, Social Reformer. She was born in Boston, the oldest of eight children. After attending a private girls' school in that city, she became a Sunday school teacher and ran a nursery. She published essays while a teenager in the "Christian Register" and became involved with the Transcendentalists after hearing lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the invitation of Elizabeth Peabody, she attended the "conversations" run by feminist Margaret Fuller. Based on these sessions, an unofficial form of continued education for women, she wrote two books, "Margaret and Her Friends" (1895) and "Transcendentalism in New England" (1897). In 1842, she became the vice principal of a girls' school in Georgetown, near Washington, D.C. While there, she promoted the need to educate African-Americans and contributed to the anti-slavery periodical "The Liberty Bell". In September 1844, she married the Unitarian minister Charles Henry Appleton Dall, with whom she would have two children. After living in Baltimore, she returned to Boston with her husband. They later moved to Portsmouth, NH, Needham, MA, and Toronto as Mr. Dall accepted various pastor positions. While in Canada, Mrs. Dall became a corresponding editor for a women's journal titled "Una". The family moved to Boston in 1854 and, shortly after, Mr. Dall moved to Calcutta, India as a foreign missionary; with the exception of occasional visits to his family, he remained there until his death. Essentially on her own, Mrs. Dall became more involved in various causes. She was one of the organizers for a woman's rights convention in Boston in 1855 was one of the principal speakers at the New England Woman's Rights Convention in Boston in 1859. She became an active lecturer and published many of them as well as biographies of various women, and a children's book titled "Patty Gray's Journey to the Cotton Islands". Her book, "The College, The Market, and the Court: or Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law" (1867) is considered a major book of American feminist thought. She was a founding member of the American Social Science Association (an organization to assist less privileged people, including the poor and mentally ill) and served on its executive committee until 1905. For her work, Alfred University granted her an honorary doctorate in 1877. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1879 and continued writing and teaching until her death there.