Willard, Emma Hart (1787-1870)

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Emma Hart Willard (1787-1870)

Founder of the troy female seminary

Turning Point. Born in Berlin, Connecticut, in February 1787, Emma was the sixteenth of seventeen children. Her ancestors were among the most prominent settlers of New England, and her father had served as a militia captain in the Revolutionary War as well as in the state General Assembly. Emma attended a local district school, but much of her learning came at home. Reading aloud with her parents, she became a voracious reader of books that she borrowed from a nearby village library. At fifteen she began studying at the Berlin Academy under the tutelage of Thomas Miner, a graduate of Yale and the academy’s founder. It was a turning point in her life. “No better instruction was given to girls in any school, at that time in the country,” she recalled years later. Inspired and intellectually stimulated by Miner’s lectures, Willard began teaching in the village school in 1804 at the age of seventeen. The experiences at the Berlin Academy and the village school sparked in her a lifelong passion for learning and teaching. From 1804 until the publication of her famous “Plan for Improving Female Education” (1819) she alternated periods of teaching and extending her own education.

Improving Female Education. In Willard’s “Plan for Improving Female Education,” addressed to the New York legislature, she argued (albeit unsuccessfully) that states had an obligation to charter and finance colleges for women as well as men. In doing so she was contradicting the statement made the previous year by Thomas Jefferson in which he stated that female education should concentrate on “ornaments” and “the amusements of life.” Explained Jefferson, “These, for a female, are dancing, drawing, and music.” Willard told the legislature that the education of women “has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” The problem, she articulated, was that “the taste of men … has been made into a standard for the formation of the female character.” Reason and religion teach us, she said, that “we too are primary existences … not the satellites of men.” Astute enough to understand the temper of the times, she explained to the male legislators that educated mothers would raise citizens of better character. Properly educated female teachers, she hastened to add, would be both more virtuous and less expensive than male instructors. Always careful to appeal to men’s self-interests, Willard asked: “Who knows how great and good a race of men may yet arise from the forming hands of mothers, enlightened by the bounty of their beloved country?”

Troy Female Seminary. While bold enough to seek financial assistance for the formation of an educational institution for women, Willard was aware that it was foolhardy to propose a college for women, given contemporary views about women. Instead she coined the termfema/e seminary even though she had every intention of making such an institution operate on the same level as men’s colleges. Over the next two years Willard embarked on a personal crusade for women’s education, and after several unsuccessful attempts to raise the necessary finances, in 1821 she was able to establish the Troy (New York) Female Seminary. The Seminary became one of the first institutions for the education of girls and the first teacher-training institution in the nation. Willard believed that young women should and could learn academic subjects typically reserved for men, so the curriculum at the Troy Female Seminary included a full range of classes from Latin to geography. At its opening session in 1821 ninety young women enrolled, a number that grew every year that Willard served as teacher and administrator. She helped to design the buildings, selected or wrote the textbooks, and organized the curriculum. As the years passed, she added more advanced subjects in an effort to keep the institution’s course of study as rigorous as that of any male college in the country. Willard spent most of her life at the Troy Female Seminary, and forty years after her death the trustees honored her memory by renaming the institution the Emma Willard School.

Pioneer. In addition to founding the Troy Female Seminary, Willard was an accomplished teacher in her own right, the author of textbooks on geography and history, an early supporter of teacher education, and an unflagging advocate of common schools. She was a pioneer in challenging popular concepts of the role of women in the new republic. Although she accepted many of the inequalities of her era’s highly patriarchal society, she did much to draw attention to the serious deficiencies in the education of girls. The ideas she expressed throughout her life provided thousands of women with the necessary leverage for increasing both their level of formal education and their opportunities as teachers.