Emma Willard

Emma Willard 1787-1870, American educator, pioneer in woman's education, b. Emma Hart in Berlin, Conn. She attended and later taught in the local academy and in 1807 took charge of the Female Academy at Middlebury, Vt. Two years later she married Dr. John Willard. In 1814 she opened a school in her home, where she taught subjects not then available to women. In 1818 she addressed to the New York legislature an appeal for support of her plan for improving female education, and Governor Clinton invited her to move to New York state. Her school was opened (1819) at Waterford but promised financial support was not forthcoming, and in 1821 the Troy Female Seminary was founded under her leadership. Troy became famous, offering collegiate education to women and new opportunity to women teachers. She wrote a number of textbooks, a journal of her trip abroad in 1830, and a volume of poems, including "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep." In 1838 Willard retired from active management of the school, which was later renamed in her honor. She devoted the remainder of her life to the improvement of common schools and to the cause of woman's education.

Bibliography: See A. Lutz, Emma Willard, Daughter of Democracy (1929) and Emma Willard, Pioneer Educator of American Women (1964).

Willard, Emma (1787–1870) US educational reformer. A pioneer of women's education, she founded a boarding-school in Vermont (1814) to teach subjects not then available to women (such as mathematics and philosophy). Willard moved the school to Troy, New York (1821), where it became known as the Troy Female Seminary; the college education that it offered served as a model for subsequent women's colleges in the USA and Europe.

Willard, Emma [Hart] (1787–1870), pioneer in women's education, at Middlebury, Vt. (1814), opened her Female Seminary to teach such subjects as mathematics, philosophy, history, and the sciences, which had been previously closed to women. Her Address …Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education (1819), sent to Governor Clinton of New York, attracted attention that led to her founding another seminary in Troy (1821), which offered the equivalent of a college education for women, 16 years before Mount Holyoke, the first women's college, was founded. In addition to works on female education and texts for her school, she published a volume of mediocre verse, The Fulfillment of a Promise (1831), still remembered for Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep, which became extremely popular in its musical setting by the English composer Joseph P. Knight.