Emma Willard

American educator

• Born: February 23, 1787
• Birthplace: Berlin, Connecticut
• Died: April 15, 1870
• Place of death: Troy, New York

Willard’s contribution to the education of women helped prompt the development of women’s colleges and coeducational universities in the United States. Her strong belief in the need for women to be properly educated moved her to develop new methods of training teachers and to work for the professionalization of teaching.

Early Life

Emma Hart Willard was the ninth of the ten children her mother, née Lydia Hinsdale, bore as Samuel Hart’s second wife. Her paternal forefathers included Stephen Hart and Thomas Hooker, a clergyman who left England in 1633 and founded the towns of Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut. Robert Hinsdale, a maternal forefather, settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1637 and later became a founder of Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Life in the simple farmhouse where Willard was born was anything but routine. Her home was a center of intellectual curiosity that encouraged learning. Evenings were spent listening to Samuel Hart speak of the founding of the republic, or discussing John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, and other philosophers. Lydia Hart frequently read aloud and taught the children about Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, and William Shakespeare.

Willard, eager for learning and a voracious reader, taught herself geometry at the age of thirteen. At fifteen she enrolled at the Berlin Academy. Two years later, she began teaching the younger children of Berlin in the district school. When Willard taught, she made her subjects interesting, allowed recreation periods, and gave much deserved praise to her students. In 1805 she conducted classes for older boys and girls in her father’s house. A year later she took charge of the Berlin Academy during the winter term. During the spring and fall of these years, she also attended classes at two private female schools in Hartford.

Willard’s reputation as a teacher grew. She was offered positions at three schools: in Middlebury, Vermont; Westfield, Massachusetts; and Hudson, New York. Willard accepted the position as an assistant at the academy in Westfield because it was close to her parents’ home. She was not, however, given full authority to direct the school. Disappointed with her limited duties, she left after only a few months, to take charge of the girls’ academy in Middlebury, Vermont.

A pretty blue-eyed girl with fair hair and a well-proportioned figure, Willard spent her free time studying science, writing poetry, and visiting friends. While in Middlebury she fell in love with Dr. John Willard, a twice-widowed physician, who had given up medical practice to accept the position of Marshal of Vermont offered by President Jefferson. They were married on August 10, 1809, when Emma was twenty-two and Dr. Willard, fifty. John Hart Willard, their only child, was born a year later.

With her husband’s encouragement, Willard began to study his medical books. His nephew, John Willard, lived with them while attending Middlebury College. John freely shared his class notes and texts with Emma and patiently answered all questions as she taught herself the knowledge that formal education had denied her. This experience opened Willard’s eyes to the inequities between male and female education. Never before had she fully realized that women were deprived of educational opportunities.

Dr. Willard was on the board of directors when the State Bank of Vermont was robbed in 1812. The board members were suspected and made to pay restitution. To aid her husband and ease his financial burdens, Willard opened the Middlebury Female Seminary in her own home during the spring of 1814. Her second goal was to create a better school than those in existence.

Willard pioneered new fields of study for women. She was careful, however, also to satisfy those of conventional mind. Gradually adding mathematics, history, and modern languages to the curriculum, Willard showed that women could pursue subjects traditionally reserved for men. From the outset, she encouraged her students to consider teaching. Those interested became assistant teachers while continuing their studies. She personally conducted examinations of students and invited Middlebury College teachers to attend and witness the strength and development of the students’ minds.

Willard knew she needed more teachers to teach additional subjects, but she had no money. When negotiations with Vermont officials failed to result in the establishment of a female seminary located at Burlington, she chose to seek the support of Governor DeWitt Clinton and the New York legislature for a program of state-aided schools for girls. In February, 1818, she sent Clinton a completed copy of An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New-York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education (1819).

The plan contained four sections detailing the existing inadequacies in female education, outlining both the proper facilities and the curriculum needed, and carefully listing the benefits of such an education to society. Emphasized were the facts that there would be better trained teachers for the common schools and that women would be willing to work for less pay. This last statement would come to haunt Emma. The following year, a determined Emma went to Albany to lobby for her plan. Almost fearless in the face of prejudice against female education, she personally met with, and presented her proposal to, members of the New York legislature. The legislature chartered the Waterford Academy for Young Ladies and passed legislation authorizing a share of the Literary Fund to be given to female seminaries.

Life’s Work

In anticipation of state funding, the seminary was relocated to Waterford, New York, where Willard could make her work more visible to the legislature. No money was allocated, however, and none was received for sixteen years. Within a short time, she received an offer of financial aid from the Common Council of Troy, New York. The Council agreed to raise four thousand dollars by means of a special tax to purchase a female academy. In September, 1821, the Troy Female Seminary opened. The city was an ideal location. Because the seminary was situated in an inland port on the Hudson, students from distant areas could easily come to the school, and its newly trained teachers could easily travel westward. At her new school, Willard continued to develop the methods she had initiated at Middlebury. Workdays of twelve to fifteen hours were not uncommon for her. To illustrate and supplement her teaching methods, she began to write the first of numerous textbooks on geography and history. A collection of her poems was also published.

The seminary was successful; within ten years it had an enrollment of more than three hundred, including more than one hundred boarding students. The school was designed to prepare students for life. Willard initiated a system of self-government with monitors and demerits. She emphasized good manners and personal appearance, not fancy dress. To make the girls feel more at home, Willard offered each student a small room with a roommate. Willard held weekly talks with the girls stressing manners and behavior. She was their role model, just as the school became a model for future American boarding schools.

The seminary’s curriculum included classical and domestic subjects and introduced advanced science courses. Willard held public examinations of individual students at the end of each term. She gave financial aid to those students interested in teaching, providing free tuition, board, and even clothes, if needed. Repayment was to be made after graduation when the student secured a teaching position. Willard did not believe in the same education for boys and girls. She adhered to the ideology of woman’s domestic role, and she discouraged any interest in politics.

As her students began careers in teaching across the United States, Willard founded the Willard Association for Mutual Improvement of Female Teachers. She kept in touch with her former students, providing news about alumnae, constantly advising them about teaching methods, and exhorting them to continue to learn new subjects throughout life.

When Dr. Willard, who had been school physician and business manager, died in 1825, Willard took full charge of the school. Thirteen years later, royalties from her numerous books made it possible for Willard to give control of the seminary to her son John and his wife, Sara Lucretia (née Hudson). Following retirement, she married Christopher Yates, an Albany physician, on September 17, 1838. The marriage was a disaster, and after nine months she left him to live in Berlin, Connecticut, with her sister Mary. (A divorce was granted in 1843 by the legislature of Connecticut.) While she lived there, Willard began to assist Henry Barnard, secretary of the State Board of Commissioners, in his campaign to improve the common schools, and later that same year, 1840, she was elected superintendent of four district schools for Kensington, Connecticut.

Four years later, at her son’s urging, she returned to Troy and lived in a small house on the school grounds. Willard continued to write and publish poems, as well as A Treatise on the Motive Powers which Produce the Circulation of the Blood (1846). She gained recognition for her work in physiology and was one of the few women admitted to the Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1845-1846, Willard conducted a series of teacher institutes throughout southern New York State and southern and Western states as far as Texas. In her later years, in addition to revising her textbooks, Willard studied both Greek and Hebrew because she wanted to read books in their original language. Willard also began to work for different causes. She exhorted the French government to consult women as it drafted a new constitution. She worked to preserve the Union and peace. She published Universal Peace (1864), which proposed an international organization, similar to what later became the League of Nations, to settle international problems. Willard remained active until her death in 1870, at eighty-three. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery outside Troy, New York. The Troy Female Seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School in 1895.

Significance

Before 1820, women’s place was in the home. All intellectual pursuit was discouraged because it was thought that it would harm the female. The little education available to females was obtained either at “dame” schools, usually conducted by poorly trained women in their own homes, or during summer months when some district schools would admit girls. After 1790, female seminaries began to develop. Because of tuition and other costs, poor girls were automatically excluded.

As Willard grew to adulthood and developed into a teacher, she began to realize how limited female education was. Later, when she established her own school, she worked vigorously to free women from ignorance. Willard was interested in developing thinkers, scholarship, and high ideals and encouraged self-respect and self-support.

Willard’s aim had been to advance the cause of female education as the only base that could support the advancement of women. She believed that women had much to give to their country. Willard proved that women could do serious study without harm to themselves. Although Willard did not work for women’s rights as such, she served as a bridge between traditional supportive women and the Victorian suffragists by being willing and able to challenge conservative notions.

The Troy Female Seminary predated the establishment of girls’ schools in Boston and New York. It was a pioneer normal school established some eighteen years before the founding of Horace Mann’s normal school. Willard was the first to think seriously about the problems and methods of teaching, the first to encourage the professionalization of teaching. She was the first woman to write textbooks on advanced subjects and may have been the first female lobbyist. She recognized the virtue of continuing education throughout one’s life. Willard’s contribution to female education was a major element in the development of women’s colleges and coeducational universities into a permanent part of national life in the United States.

Bibliography

Anticaglia, Elizabeth. Twelve American Women. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975. Presents good biographical sketches of twelve women, ranging from Anne Hutchinson to Margaret Mead, selected for their significant contributions to American civilization. One chapter is devoted to Willard.

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. Tries to explain the duality of the “bond” that tied New England women together as well as to their station in life. Of particular interest is the third chapter, which offers a cohesive rationale for schooling women beyond the level of minimal literacy.

Crevin, Lawrence A., and R. Freeman Butts. A History of Education in American Culture. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953. Provides a sound historical background of the development of American education.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959. Covers the women’s rights movement from the Mayflower Compact to 1920, when women won the vote. Flexner provides significant information about the many smaller movements within the larger one. The first two chapters cover the position of women up to 1800 and the early steps taken to secure equal education.

Goodsell, Willystine, ed. Pioneers of Women’s Education in the U.S.: E. Willard, C. Beecher, M. Lyon. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Following a brief introduction to women’s education, part 1 presents a brief biography of Willard. Excerpts from her Plan and three selections from the prefaces of her texts are included.

Hoffman, Nancy. Women’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981. Presents the experience of teaching from the viewpoint of the teacher and highlights critical themes that defined teaching as woman’s work. Representative teachers are chosen, Willard among them. A brief biography of Willard is included along with a facsimile of the handwritten letter she sent to Governor Clinton.

Lutz, Alma. Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. Written in the style of Willard’s Letters and Journals, this dated portrait, written by an alumna of the school, remains the definitive work on Willard. All subsequent biographers have drawn from it.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Emma Willard, Pioneer Educator of Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Written in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Emma Willard School, it borrows much from Lutz’s earlier work, which contains more complete information.

Scott, Anne Firor. “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872.” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring, 1979): 3-25. Presents an analysis of the alumnae of the Troy Female Seminary and attempts to show the decisive influence Willard had not only on the students but also on every part of the country to which they went. Valuable, well-documented study that concludes that higher education played an important part in the diffusion of feminist values.

Seller, Maxine Schwartz, ed. Women Educators in the United States, 1820-1993. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Willard is one of the sixty-six women who are profiled in this book. The profile contains information about her life, goals, influences, and achievements, and lists works by and about her.