Literature Trail

Mary Abigail Dodge ("Gail Hamilton")
Mary Abigail Dodge (1833-96) was born in Hamilton and attended the Ipswich Female Seminary where she graduated in 1850 and taught there until 1854. At the age of twenty-four, she accepted a position in Hartford to teach English, simultaneously contributing to local newspapers under her pen name "Gail Hamilton" including the anti-slavery journal National Era. The Era's editor, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, was so taken with Hamilton's writing he invited her to Washington, D.C., as his children's governess. She stayed for two years, publishing political articles and establishing herself as a writer of national stature. Hamilton returned to her native place in 1860 to care for her ill mother.

From 1865 to 1867, Hamilton edited the magazine Our Young Folks with Lucy Larcom of Beverly. Hamilton's books included Country Living and Country Thinking (1862), A New Atmosphere (1865), Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-irritant (1868), and The Battle of the Books (1870). While Hamilton did not support women's suffrage, thinking it was not the most effective way for women to influence change, she spent most of her life trying to improve the status of women through her writing. "The nursery has no business to be the mother's chrysalis," she wrote. "God never intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If he had, he would have made her a caterpillar."

Home of Mary Abigail Dodge ("Gail Hamilton")
Address: 8 Gail Avenue, Hamilton (closed to the public)

Hamilton-Wenham Public Library
Address: 14 Union Street, Hamilton
Phone: 978-468-5577
Website: www.hwlibrary.org
(The library contains works by Hamilton.)