Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail
Hamilton)
1838-1896
American Authoress and Critic
Mary Abigail Dodge was born the
seventh child of James Brown Dodge and Hannah
Stanwood Dodge in Hamilton Massachusetts on
March 31, 1833. Both parents came from English
stock that had lived in Essex County,
Massachusetts for several generations. Her
father was a farmer and her mother, before
marrying Mr. Dodge, was a school teacher.
Mary was brought up on a farm
and being an energetic girl, living the life of
a farm girl suited her. In fact, contemporary
“Fanny Fern” described her as such: “She was
brought up as New England girls are generally
brought up in the country; simply, healthfully,
purely; with plenty of fence for gymnastics;
plenty of berries and birds, and flowers and
mosses, and clover blossoms and fruit in the
sweet, odorous summers; with plenty of romping
companions not subjects for early tombstones and
obituary notices, but with broad chests,
sun-kissed faces and nimble limbs and tongues.”
Mary enjoyed the freedom country living gave her
and she had a great love for nature.
Mary was a remarkable child. As
a youth, she showed a great interest in the
things of God and joined the local
Congregational Church when she was quite young.
Being very intelligent, Mary was sent to
boarding school in Cambridge at the age of
twelve where she stayed a year and then was
admitted into the Ipswich Female Seminary, from
which she graduated in 1850. She then stayed on
at the seminary to teach for the next four years
before accepting a teaching job at the Hartford
(Connecticut) Female Seminary. She stayed there
a year before moving on to the Hartford High
School, where she became a most beloved teacher.
Though her teaching career was
met with great success, Mary grew dissatisfied
with the long hours and low salary and longed to
try her hand at writing. In 1856 she sent
samples of her poetry to the antislavery
publication “National Era” in Washington which
impressed the editor, Gamaliel Bailey, because
of her unique and individual style. Two years
later she moved to Washington to become the
governess of Mr. Bailey’s children and
established herself as a writer, making
contributions to such publications as the
“Independent”, the “Congregationalist”, “Country
Living and Country Thinking”, “Summer Rest”, and
the “Atlantic Monthly”.
While she was in Washington,
Mary chose a pen name. She did this partly
because of her disdain for personal publicity
and shyness. She chose the name “Gail Hamilton”,
taking it from the last part of “Abigail” and
“Hamilton”, her place of birth.
The writings of Gail Hamilton
met with immediate success and she became a very
popular author. Her pieces grew from pointed
practical and funny sermonizing on everyday
experiences and current events to
self-development, self-reliance, and
self-respect, written from a sharp-witted
feminine viewpoint, alluding to Biblical
references to back up her point of view. She was
considered rather severe in her criticism of men
and her cutting wit made many a man wince with
her biting remarks such as: “Some men dole out
money to their wives as if it were a gift, a
charity. A man has no more right to his earning
than his wife has. What absurdity, to PAY him
his WAGES and GIVE her money to go shopping
with!”
One of her most controversial
volumes was “Woman’s Wrongs: A
Counter-Irritant”. In this book, Mary attacked
the view that women were limited by their
physical weakness and Biblical command to the
sphere of the home. Being a self-made woman, she
was a supporter of woman’s suffrage, but she did
not believe it would relieve women of economic
discrimination or be morally uplifting to
society. In fact, she thought that it might even
hinder women from an even loftier role; that of
providing spiritual guidance to society, which
she did through raising her family. She believed
that in the family, a wife and mother should
reign supreme, having a husband who loved her
and treated her with respect. She also believed
that while this was the ideal, in reality many
husbands were inclined to feeling superior to
their wives and acting as tyrants in the home.
In 1871, Mary began wintering in
Washington in the home of her cousin who was the
wife of Speaker of the House James G. Blaine.
Because of this, she became quite well known in
political circles and was able to exercise
indirect political influence. It is believed
that she often wrote Blaine’s speeches, but
while that cannot be verified, she is known to
have helped him with the writing of his “Twenty
Years of Congress in 1884. She went on to
publish her own political views in articles and
letters to the New York Tribune. In 1883, after
his death, Mary wrote “The Biography of James G.
Blaine”.
In 1895, while in Washington to
verify the last pages of her biography on James
Blaine, Mary suffered a stroke that left her
unconscious for weeks. She recovered enough to
go home to Hamilton, but died there in August
1896 of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried in
Hamilton, Massachusetts.
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