A little more than 200 years ago, Americans averaged only a little more than four months in school over the course of their lifetime. Far more boys received formal education than girls. Society thought women didn’t need a higher education. At best, they went to “finishing school,” where they prepared for their place in society. Their place was at home, raising babies. But Emma Willard made it her life’s work to improve female education.
Early Life
Samuel Hart and his second wife, Lydia Hinsdale Hart, had the sixteenth of seventeen children on February 23, 1787. They named her Emma. A farmer in Berlin, Connecticut, Hart encouraged his children to read and think for themselves. Her mother was literate, a rarity for women at the time.
Emma had a passion for learning. Though society thought females only required basic education, she took part in family discussions about the “male” topics of politics, philosophy, world politics and mathematics. She taught herself geometry.
Formal Education
Emma enrolled in her first school in Berlin, Connecticut, when she was fifteen. She excelled. Two short years later, she became a teacher. She was seventeen.
Teacher and Administrator
She taught for two years, then took charge of the academy in Berlin. She was nineteen.
After one term, she worked in Westfield, Massachusetts for a short time. She was nineteen when she accepted an offer of a summer teaching job at a “finishing school” for girls in Middlebury, Vermont.
Marriage and Family
There she met a physician named John Willard. He had four children from a previous marriage. They married in 1809. He was fifty. She was twenty-two.
Following the custom of the time, she retired to be a full-time wife. She gave birth to a son, John Hart Willard, on September 28, 1810.
Her husband’s nephew, also named John Willard, stayed with them while attending Middlebury College. His classes informed and inspired Emma’s developing sense of what a woman’s education should include.
Passionate about Educating Girls and Women
In 1814, Emma opened a girls’ school, the Middlebury Female Seminary, in her home. But the education she was supposed to offer her students differed greatly from what young men learned at the nearby college.
She conducted classes on classical and scientific subjects in her living room. These were subjects commonly thought only suited for men. Her success over the next five years prompted her to write a pamphlet, An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education (©1819). In it, she argued young women needed access to education in the same subjects as young men.
Men such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams read and warmly approved of her ideas. The New York legislators either didn’t respond or ridiculed Emma’s ideas. But New York Governor DeWitt Clinton invited Emma to open a school in his state. She moved her seminary to the town of Waterford, New York. She was thirty-two.
Unfortunately, she did not receive the financial support promised in Waterford.
The Troy Female Seminary
In 1821, she moved to Troy, New York, where the town council raised money to build a girls’ school.
Her school, the Troy Female Seminary, opened for boarding and day students in September 1821. It was the first school in the United States to offer higher education to females. Emma was thirty-four.
The curriculum included mathematics, philosophy, history, science, and geography.
To Emma, it was more important to teach students how to think, rather than what to think. She believed knowledge of geography created a foundation for “sound judgement, and an enlarged understanding” and that studying geography “brings into action the powers of comparing and abstracting.”
Her husband, John, died in 1825. She was thirty-eight.
In addition to earning her income as a teacher and principal, Emma made a living writing. She published several textbooks. Her textbook, History of the United States, or Republic of America ©1828, included her map of indigenous peoples on the eastern coast of North America.
Emma published a book of poetry in 1831, The Fulfilment of a Promise. Her poem “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” is the only poem this author found still in existence.
By 1831, the school had an enrollment of more than 300 young women. About one-third of them were boarding students.
A Tireless Advocate
In the 1830s, Emma traveled to Europe and wrote about her travels. Throughout her travels, she advocated for the education of girls and women. She even started a school in Greece.
In ancient story we are told that one of our sex remaining in Troy wrought harm to the Greeks. In modern recital may it be said that women of American Troy have done them lasting good.”
In 1835, Emma published, A System of Universal History in Perspective.
Besides her writing and her travels, Emma continued on as head of the Troy Female Seminary until she remarried in 1838. She handed the reins to her son and daughter-in-law and moved to Boston with her new husband, Dr. Christopher Yates. After nine months of marriage, they separated and were later divorced.
Emma spent the next thirty years traveling and writing but returned frequently to her house at the edge of the school grounds, where she entertained students and filled in as principal when needed.
In 1854, she represented the United States at the World’s Education Convention in London.
Other Published works
A Treatise on the Motive Powers Which Produce the Circulation of the Blood (1846)
Willard’s Historic Guide: Guide to the Temple of Time; and Universal History for Schools (1849), Last Leaves of American History (1849)
Astronography; or, Astronomical Geography (1854)
Morals for the Young in 1857.
Death
Celebrated author, cartographer, educator, and advocate for women, Emma Hart Willard died in 1870. Some claim that at the time of her death, she was the best-known woman in America. She was eighty-three.
Legacy
In 1895, the public honored Emma with three new buildings for the Troy Female Seminary. They unveiled a statue of Madame Willard and renamed the school The Emma Hart Willard School for Girls.
Emma’s poem, “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” was set to music and recorded by George Bernard Shaw in 1964.
The Emma Hart Willard School celebrated its centennial in 2014 and remains an active campus today.
In a salute to Emma Hart Willard, a woman ahead of her time, a woman with a passion for education for women, please share the name of a educator who influenced your life in a positive way.
Resources
4. Library of Congress Blog & Maps
5. Wikipedia
Image Credits
1. Top image: Emma Willard, ca. 1805-1815., CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
2. Second image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
3. Third image: by PenelopeIsMe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
4. Fourth image: by Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
5. Final image: by FloweringDagwood, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Note
if you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy other posts about women from history.