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After having taught religion in asylums, she sought change; “the appalling conditions that Dorothea Dix encountered while touring homes for the indigent insane in Massachusetts pushed her to engage in political reform efforts.” (Nielsen 70). She fought for those considered to be poor and mentally ill, wanting there to be more resources available to truly benefit them, rather than leave them traumatized and tortured. She had once described seeing “’a young woman, whose person was partially covered with portions of a blanket, sat upon the floor; her hair disheveled; her naked arms crossed languidly over the breasts; a distracted, unsteady eye and low, murmuring voice betraying both mental and physical disquiet. About the waist was a chain, the extremity of which was fastened into the wall of the house’” (Nielsen 70). Seeing this, Dix made fighting for the cause of improving the environments in which disabled persons were being treated. Dix later went to the Legislature of Massachusetts, wanting to “’present the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane, and idiotic men and women; of beings sunk to a condition from which the most unconcerned would start with real horror; of beings wretched in our prisons, and more wretched in our almshouses’” (“Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts”, paragraph 4). The institutions were being established by the governments on the East Coast, as they wanted to keep the communities “normalized”, so they saw no real issue with them and the way the employees were treating the patients. Dix later brings her case to the Senate and House of representatives, and requests that five million acres be dedicated to expanding the number of resources available to those who may need them, and that the treatment given in the newly established institutions is made to be more beneficial rather than harmful.