Emma Willard

Emma Willard ( Hart; February 23, 1787 – April 15, 1870) was an American female education activist who dedicated her life to education. She worked in several schools and founded the first school for women's higher education in the United States, the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York. With the success of her school, Willard was able to travel across the country and abroad to promote education for women. The seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School in 1895 in her honor.

Early life Emma Willard was born on February 23, 1787, in Berlin, Connecticut. Her father was a farmer who encouraged his children to read and think for themselves. When Willard was young, her father recognized her passion for learning. At that time women were only provided basic education, but Willard was included in family discussions such as politics, philosophy, world politics and mathematics that were primarily male subjects. At age 15, Willard was enrolled in her first school in 1802 in her hometown of Berlin. She progressed so quickly that just two years later at the age of 17 she was teaching there. Willard eventually took charge of the academy for a term in 1806.

Career In 1807, Willard left Berlin and briefly worked in Westfield, Massachusetts, before accepting a job offer at a female academy in Middlebury, Vermont. She held the position of principal at the academy from 1807 to 1809. She was unimpressed by the material taught there and opened a boarding school for girls, the Middlebury Female Seminary in 1814, in her own home. She was inspired by the subjects her nephew, John Willard, was learning at Middlebury College and strove to improve the curriculum that was taught at girls' schools.

In her speech to the legislature, Willard said that existing women's education was inadequate both in the amount girls received compared to boys and in its foundational principles. One issue she took was that women's education "has been too exclusively directed, to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty". Another was "it has been made the first object in educating our sex, to prepare them to please the other" while "reason and religion teach, that we too are primary existencies... not the satellites of men." Her plan included a proposal for a women's seminary to be publicly funded just as men's schools were.

The Troy Female Seminary opened in September 1821 for boarding and day students. This was the first school in the United States to offer higher education for women. The curriculum consisted of the subjects she had longed to include in women's education: mathematics, philosophy, geography, history, and science. He was a physician and 28 years her senior.

Emma and John Willard had one son together, named John Willard Hart, who received the management of the Troy Female Seminary when Willard left it in 1838. Emma's first husband died in 1825, and in 1838, she married Christopher C. Yates but was divorced from him in 1843.

Works

Along with the profits made from the Troy Female Seminary, Willard also made a living from her writing. She wrote several textbooks throughout her lifetime, including books on history and geography. Some of her works are History of the United States, or Republic of America (1828), A System of Fulfillment of a Promise (1831), A Treatise on the Motive Powers which Produce the Circulation of the Blood (1846), Guide to the Temple of Time and Universal History for Schools (1849), Last Leaves of American History (1849), Astronography; or Astronomical Geography (1854), and Morals for the Young (1857).

In 1830, she made a tour of Europe. Three years later, she donated the proceeds from her book about her travels to a school for women that she helped to found in Athens, Greece. Willard also published a book of poetry, The Fulfilment of a Promise (1831).

Her most popular poem, entitled "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," which she reportedly wrote while on an ocean voyage in 1839, was set to music by Joseph Philip Knight and became a very popular hymn in the 19th century.

Atlas and geography textbooks Willard cowrote The Woodbridge and Willard Geographies and Atlases (1823) with American geographer William Channing Woodbridge. She co-authored with him A System of Universal Geography on the Principles of Comparison and Classification. Willard and Woodbridge created the first widely used historical atlas of the U.S. The maps, graphs, and pictures integrated the details of the nation's geography into the broad popular image of the country as a large, powerful complex nation. Her map-drawing geographic pedagogy became popular in the United States and also influential in American missionary schools in South Asia during the nineteenth century.

Later life and death

John Willard, Emma's husband, died in 1825. She headed the Troy Female Seminary until she remarried in 1838, and left the school in the hands of her son and daughter-in-law. She married Dr. Christopher Yates and moved to Boston with him.

She has been the subject of several biographies. Her geographies are discussed by Calhoun and her histories by Baym.