[5] As a young woman, she received a comprehensive education, encouraged by her father to write novels and essays, and to engage in debates about religion, philosophy and politics.

Although she continued to write through the early years of her marriage and child-rearing, after her husband moved to Calcutta, India to perform missionary work, Dall became an active participant in the Boston Women's Rights movement.

[citation needed] After deciding that she did not like working with groups, Dall turned to writing as her principal means of addressing women's equality.

her most prominent works from this time included Historical Pictures Retouched: a Volume of Miscellanies (1861), which highlighted previously ignored women in history, and a collection of lectures entitled The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867) in which she argued that the modern woman was no longer content to be in the domestic sphere and should be allowed to participate in public life.

Dall was seen as too conservative by Parker Pillsbury who dismissed her 1860 effort to form a new women's rights faction in Boston with discussion "limited to the subjects of Education, Vocation and Civil Position" rather than more challenging topics such as divorce.

Susan B. Anthony wrote, "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform.