Sophia Willard Dana Ripley
Sophia Willard Dana Ripley (1808-1865) was an influential educator, transcendentalist, and a founding member of the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. Born in Cambridge to a prominent family, she was the eldest of four children and received her early education through home tutoring. In 1823, Sophia and her family established a successful school, which laid the groundwork for her future educational philosophies. After marrying Unitarian minister George Ripley in 1827, she became actively involved in the intellectual movements of her time, contributing to the transcendentalist journal, The Dial.
Sophia was known for her progressive views on women's rights, arguing for their independence and ability to work outside traditional domestic roles. She played a significant role in the Institute of Agriculture and Education, where she combined teaching with manual labor in a community focused on idealism. Following the collapse of Brook Farm in 1847, she continued her educational work while also engaging in charitable activities, eventually embracing Catholicism. Sophia Ripley passed away at the age of fifty-seven and is remembered for her contributions to education and social reform, as well as her impactful presence within the transcendentalist movement.
Sophia Willard Dana Ripley
- Sophia Willard Ripley
- Born: July 6, 1803
- Died: February 4, 1861
Educator, transcendentalist, and charter member of Brook Farm, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest of four children, two daughters and two sons, born to Francis Dana (whose father, also named Francis Dana, was chief justice of Massachusetts and the first U.S. first envoy to Russia) and Sophia (Willard) Dana (whose father was Joseph Willard, president of Harvard College). Francis Dana was an irresponsible though charming man who was often absent, wandering in Europe, during much of the time his children were growing up. Sophia Dana tutored her daughter, who completed her formal education in Boston.
To make ends meet, the Dana women—Sophia Dana (then nineteen), her sister, and her mother—opened a school in Cambridge in 1823. The school did well, and Sophia Dana, the principal teacher, began to develop ideas about education that would distinguish her teaching at Brook Farm two decades later. In August 1827 she married George Ripley, the young Unitarian minister of Boston’s Purchase Street Church. His feelings were inspired, he told his mother, by Sophia Dana’s “intellectual power, moral worth, deep and true Christian piety, and peculiar refinement and dignity of character.” They had no children.
For the next nine years, Sophia Ripley lived the quiet, purposeful life of a minister’s wife. Her husband’s enthusiasm for philosophical debate gradually drew her to the center of the intellectual upheaval that stirred Boston during the 1830s. She attended the “Conversations” for which Margaret Fuller sold subscriptions, and later she helped her husband and Fuller edit the transcendentalists’ monthly journal, The Dial. “I cannot understand her mental processes,” Fuller wrote of Ripley, “and what she says sounds factitious at first [but] … I understand her much better [than I do George Ripley] … and she usually goes higher and sees clearer than he does.” For The Dial, Ripley wrote articles on Ohio’s Zoar community, which she and her husband visited in 1840; on painting and sculpture; and on the right of women to be treated as individuals and to work outside their homes.
In 1841 the Ripleys helped found the Institute of Agriculture and Education, a community of idealists who sought to to unite manual labor with the life of the mind. The community was reorganized along Fourierist lines in 1845. Ripley took on more than her share of work, dividing her time between the laundry and the farm’s only consistent source of income, its school. Teaching history and modern languages, Ripley had a reputation for inspiring in her students “a genuine fervor for culture.”
After Brook Farm’s collapse during the summer of 1847, the debt-ridden Ripleys moved to Flatbush, Long Island, New York, where Sophia Ripley taught school while George Ripley worked at newspaper editing. In 1849 they moved to Manhattan. Amid these painful adjustments, Sophia Ripley sought solace in Catholicism, a faith that several other Brook Farmers also embraced. She devoted her energies to charitable causes during the next ten years and in 1858 became trustee of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, a convent whose members worked to reform prostitutes. She died of cancer in New York at the age of fifty-seven and was buried in the Dana family tomb at Cambridge.
Tall, willowy, and graceful, Ripley had a commanding presence. Strangers were easily put off by her, but many who found her closed nature puzzling were nonetheless drawn to her. “There was something so lovely in her face,” a niece wrote of her, “—perhaps the English would have called it countenance. Her exquisite manners, and her low, beautifully modulated voice, added to the charm.” She left a clear mark on her age as a tireless supporter of the main reformist impulses of her time and place and as one of those who worked the hardest to create and sustain that celebrated social experiment Brook Farm.
Aside from her letters, many of which are owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society, Ripley wrote little. Her three articles in The Dial were “Woman,” January 1841; “Painting and Sculpture,” July 1841; and “Letter from Zoar,” July 1841. Biographical sources include Notable American Women (1971) and H. D. Raymond, “Sophia Willard Dana Ripley: Co-Founder of Brook Farm,” Master’s thesis, Columbia University (1949). All the biographies of George Ripley touch on Sophia Ripley’s life, as do the works on Brook Farm that are listed for him. See also C. H. Dall, Margaret and Her Friends (1859 and R. W. Emerson, Journals, 10 vols. (1909-14) and Letters, 6 vols. (1939).