Women today outnumber men at most leading universities and colleges. However, women used to have to fight to be educated. Here is the story of one female education pioneer, Emma Willard.
Beginnings
Emma Willard was born in 1787 in Berlin Connecticut. She had fifteen older siblings and one younger sibling. Emma was lucky enough to attend a district school while growing up. She began teaching children at age 17. By age 20, she was receiving job offers from all over the country. Willard accepted a job offer in Vermont, where she married Dr. John Willard (age 50).
In 1814, Emma Willard started the Middlebury Female Seminary, which operated out of her own home. She then moved to New York and opened the Waterford Academy in 1819, but it was forced to close due to a lack of funding two years later. In 1819, the same year she opened the Academy, Willard approached the New York legislature and criticized the current focus of female education, which was largely focused on charm and beauty. Just a year before, Thomas Jefferson had written in a letter that women should not read novels or poetry. Willard criticized these sentiments, saying that the formation of the female character had been tailored too much to “the taste of men.” Willard said, “we too are primary existences…not the satellites of men.”
In 1821, she started the Troy Female Seminary, which became the first recognized institution for female education. It was later named the Emma Willard School and it still exists today.
Willard continued to run the school even after her husband died in 1825. In 1830, she went on a European tour and then published a book. She took all proceeds of the book and gave it to the Athens, Greece school for women that she helped found. Willard remarried in 1838 to Dr. Christopher Yates. She gave the institution to her son and daughter-in-law that same year. Willard moved to Boston to be with Yates, but they separated nine months later. She continued to write until she died in 1870.