 |
| Emma Willard School, circa 1940 (The Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library) |
As I reviewed this post, I was struck again by how savvy Willard was in the way she positioned and advanced her signature educational innovation. She told the Lords of Albany one thing--but clearly had another in mind.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
In a world where fathers determined the future of each family member, women in the early American republic had little opportunity to engage in entrepreneurial activities. “God made woman to be a help for man,” the
Reverend Horace Bushnell wrote, “not to be a wrestler with him.”[1]
Mrs. A. J. Graves cautioned that for a woman to leave the home sphere meant that she was deserting the station which God and nature had assigned her. “Home,” Graves reminded her sisters, “is the cradle of the human race.”[2]
 |
| Emma Willard (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard) |
If females
were responsible for the home, and home was the wellspring of civilization, then—a logical person might conclude—females ought to have greater access to the educational opportunities
afforded men. And few female educators
took advantage of this crack in the ordained hierarchy more successfully than
Emma Hart Willard, born the sixteenth child of a Connecticut
farmer.
Willard
escaped the drudgery of farm life to accept a teaching job at a female academy
in Middlebury, Vermont. Unhappy with the
curriculum and convinced that women should be exposed to the same academic
disciplines as men, she petitioned the New York legislature to grant state aid
to open a girls’ schools.
Her 1819
essay, “A Plan for Improving Female Education,” expressed her disappointment at the inferior educational opportunities available to females while
laying out the novel idea of a school for women’s higher education.
Willard knew
to tread gently, emphasizing that the school she sought to create would be
different from those available to men. She did not wish to “insinuate that we are not, in particular situations, to yield obedience to the other sex” nor did she seek to make females anything but agreeable to men. She could undoubtedly anticipate these objections in the New York Assembly as politicians read her tract. “You are our natural guardians,” she pleaded, and “we have the charge of the whole mass of individuals, who are to compose the succeeding generations.”
But, she wrote, the education of females has been too long directed “to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” This curriculum did not prepare them for the “serious duties of mature years.” Why, she asked, "have you neglected our education?”[3]
But, she wrote, the education of females has been too long directed “to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” This curriculum did not prepare them for the “serious duties of mature years.” Why, she asked, "have you neglected our education?”[3]
 |
| Emma Willard Statue, Emma Willard Seminary (Curt Teich postcards, Detroit Publishing Company) |
The New York
legislature remained unmoved, but New York Governor DeWitt Clinton was not. With the Governor’s blessing, Willard
opened the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, the first school in America for women’s higher
education. There (in a foreshadowing of what we would one day call "STEM,") she managed to slip in
a few subjects to complement “housewifery”--including mathematics, history, science, and
geography.
Today, the
Troy Female Seminary continues its successful operation as the Emma Willard School. And the World Bank reminds us that giving girls access to schooling is the most powerful way to eradicate poverty, raise a nation's GDP, and improve outcomes for children around the world.
[1] Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846, New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 258.
[2] “A. J. Graves Gives a Scriptural
Justification for Women’s Domesticity, 1843,” Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1787-1848, Wilentz and Earle,
ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 155.
[3] Emma Willard, A Plan For Improving Female Education, Middlebury, VT: Middlebury
College [rpt: 1819, 2nd edition], 1918.
No comments:
Post a Comment