History
Biographical Overview
Emma Hart Willard
Founder of Emma Willard School
Reprinted from The Conservationist, March-April,
1979
n
1787, Emma Hart was born, next to the last of Samuel Hart's 17 children.
Theirs was a prosperous farming family just south of Hartford, and Hart was
thought to be a descendant of the man for whom the city was named. It is
probable that Hart could have quashed his daughter's inquisitiveness had
it offended him, but he had a liberal frame of mind and encouraged the girl,
educating her as far as possible in the system of that day. When, at the
age of 12, she began to teach herself geometry, a study of which the female
brain was literally thought incapable, her father saw her through it and
also engaged her in discussions of philosophy.
In her late teens, Emma studied and then also taught at several "girls academies" which were essentially finishing schools. At length, she was asked to Middlebury, Vermont, to direct that town's institution for young ladies. The girls' academy was housed above a boys' grammar school and 20-year-old Emma had charge of both. She had strong ideas about education, which sprang from a desire to excite learning and avoid boredom and rote.
In 1809 she married Dr. John Willard, a widower 28 years her senior. Emma withdrew from teaching, apparently having no further professional designs. Like Emma's father, Dr. Willard was not put off by the young woman's intelligence, but rather enjoyed it. The liberality of those two most important men in her life probably permitted a tree to grow, which would have been stunted by commoner men. So, while raising the doctor's children and her own baby, Emma began to study the books brought home by her oldest stepson, a student at Middlebury College (open, of course, to men only) and began to get a very strong taste of the breadth and depth of educational opportunity closed to her sex.
Any outlet for her vivified feelings about women's intellectual possibilities seemed remote, but in 1812 financial havoc brought her husband's affairs low following robbery of a bank in which he was a director. Partly to add income and partly to satisfy herself, she asked him to permit her to open a school for young women in their own home. Dr. Willard hedged but finally approved the plan. The success of this school was decisive in her long career. She began to teach the higher subjects, notably mathematics, which had not been systematically introduced to women before that time, and she began the practice of inviting scholars and prominent citizens to the exhibition of the girls' proficiencies at examination time.
Amid growing public awareness of her work, Mrs. Willard formulated her ideas about women's education in a draft she called "A Plan for Improving Female Education." To remove any "taint" of presuming intellectual equality with men, which would have spoiled her chances for an audience, she revised the document repeatedly.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Mrs. Willard's plan was that the institution she envisioned not be a private academy, such as already existed fairly commonly, but a publicly endowed seminary supervised by a board of public men, precisely as the best institutions for young men were governed. For realization of this plan, she needed the attention of men in public office, and it was this necessity which first turned her efforts to New York State. She sent her plan to Governor Clinton in 1818 and closed the covering letter with these exceedingly humble words which must have tried her pride, for she can only have felt impatience for a man unable to see her point: "If Mr. Clinton should not view this plan as its authoress hopes he may, but should think the time devoted to its perusal sacrificed, let him not consider its presentation to him as an intrusion of an individual ignorant of the worth of his time ... but as the enthusiasm of a projector, misjudging of her project and overrating its value."
However, Clinton was pleased and replied, in part: "I shall be gratified to see this work in print, and still more pleased to see you at the head of the proposed institution, enlightening it by your talents, guiding it by your experience, and practically illustrating its merits and blessings."
At Mrs. Willard's expense, the plan was published and sent to some of the most prominent men in the country. President Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all read the document and approved its philosophy. Although Emma Willard never maintained that women were the political equals of men or should assume roles independent of men, that philosophy incorporated one concept on which the entire women's movement was founded. She wrote:
"But reason and religion teach that we too are primary existences...the companions, not the satellites of men,...Education should seek to bring its subject to the perfection of their moral, intellectual, and physical nature ... in order that they may be the means of the greatest possible happiness of which they are capable, both as to what they enjoy and what they communicate."
In 1819 Mrs. Willard moved her school from Vermont to a building that the citizens of Waterford, N.Y. had leased for the purpose. Some temporary funds were voted for the first year, but the state legislature twice refused to pass the expected funding despite Governor Clinton's backing. Having overspent the income of the school in the spring of 1821, and without other finances, Emma prepared to close the school
Enter the Troy Common Council. Emma wrote this news to her mother: "The corporation has raised $4000 by tax. Another fund has been raised by subscription." At last, after nearly a decade of financial worries, Emma was on her way to fame and modest fortune.
For legal reasons, the building was leased at $400 to Dr. Willard, who willingly and with encouragement had accompanied his wife on the moves that her career required. The Troy Female Seminary opened in September 1821 with 90 girls enrolled--29 from Troy and some from as far away as Georgia and North Carolina. The cost was $200 a year for board, bed and bedding, furniture and room rent, fuel, light, washing, and tuition. The girls were asked only to furnish a tablespoon, a teaspoon, and towels. Certain courses, music and French, for example, cost an extra $10 annually. For the times these charges were considerable. But for the scholarships provided by Mrs. Willard herself to deserving girls, enrollment would have been limited to daughters of the prosperous.
By 1830, Troy's population was near 15,000. Its broad commerce with the new nation took the name and reputation of the new school throughout the country; daughters of governors attended; the school progressively increased its course of studies. "She demonstrated," wrote biographer John Lord, "and was one of the first to demonstrate, that there are no subjects which young men can grasp which cannot equally be mastered by young ladies." Emma herself began studying with the natural scientist Professor Amos Eaton during this period, and they developed an admiring professional friendship. He ultimately took charge of a new science department at the school, offering courses that were more advanced than those at most men's colleges. But Mrs. Willard's deepest interests lay more with geography and history. In searching out methods which would excite students to learn rather than force them to rote, she hit upon novelties which, when published, became enormously popular, not to mention profitable. Her 1828 "Republic of America" drew favorable reviews from the big city papers, and the great Daniel Webster wrote the author to say that he kept the volume near "as a book of reference, accurate in facts and dates."
For a few years the Troy Female Seminary was the sole beacon of rational education for women in the United States, but its success soon spawned many children, some by example, others by the labors of its graduates. In the south the schools were often called "colleges," a name Mrs. Willard shunned for fear that men would consider it a presumption of equality with men's colleges. Mary Lyon, who founded Mt. Holyoke in 1837, was active in New England, experimenting with ideas about teaching. Boston Public Latin School for Boys, founded in 1635, gained a sister school in 1826. So popular was this institution that it was closed two years later by officials who feared its effects on women's role in society. Oberlin opened its doors a few years later (1833) to what must have seemed to many a scandalous mixture of male and female, white and black students.
Emma went to Europe in 1830 and came back with pride in her country and her own accomplishment significantly bolstered. Having made a point to meet two leading women educators in France and England, she expected to learn much to apply to her own school. Instead, she found institutions that seemed much inferior and colleagues who wanted her advice. In 1833 she published "Journal and Letters from France and Great Britain" and donated the proceeds to help start a female seminary in Greece.
Back at home she focused more on the "teaching of teaching" to girls who wanted to spread the movement. In this sense, the Troy Female Seminary was perhaps the first normal, or teacher's school, in the United States. Looking back on her seminary after she had turned it over to her son and his wife, she wrote in 1844:
"I was engaged in teaching thirty years, and have had under my charge as, early as I can calculate, 5,000 pupils, of whom as many as one in ten ... have been teachers; and of these teachers, I think more than half have been those whom I have educated without present pay—their bills to be refunded from their earnings."
To a large extent, there was no such repayment; John Lord estimated that the fees she waived totaled $75,000.
Dr. Willard died in 1825, and after 14 years of lonely widowhood Emma married Dr. Christopher Yates and moved with him to Boston'. From the start it was clear that the doctor intended to abandon his profession and force Emma to support him in great style and idleness. In the tradition of that day, she suffered incredible assaults on her emotional health before deciding that her very sanity depended on enduring the scandal of divorce. Nine months after her marriage she escaped to the home of her favorite sister in her native town of Berlin, Connecticut. Amid the scenes of her childhood, Emma soon recovered her health and was elected Superintendent of Public Schools in Kensington. Her divorce was granted in 1843.
Nearing 60, Emma Willard retired in comfort to Troy at her son's bidding and took up her writing amid the activities of the thriving school. She wrote on a remarkable variety of subjects. In truth, however, her enthusiasm outstripped her vision in much of what she examined. Her poetry is florid and trite. Her theory of the force which moves the blood, though clever in a way, merely took the model of the central heating system in her school's new five-story building and assumed the body's circulation of liquid was reasonably similar, requiring no pump. Of blacks, she had a pitifully unexamined prejudice. As war threatened in 1860, she spent weeks composing her "Via Media," the 11 perfect compromise" to avert disaster. It suggested no political rights for blacks, but rather indentured service to whites in order to earn passage to Liberia. Her attitude on these subjects was uncompromising, and it annoyed her that the public did not accept them. But where women's roles and rights were concerned, she maintained a quiet conviction that woman was fundamentally man's equal. She refused to join Elizabeth Stanton, a Troy Female Seminary graduate, in a campaign for a political voice for women; the pioneer educator probably feared a backlash against women which would jeopardize their educational advancement, and in turn, the whole progress toward equality. But perhaps she felt that it was up to others to carry on a fight of which she inwardly approved. In an open letter, published just before the women's convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, she wrote: "As a human being walks in safety with both his limbs, while with one only he hobbles and is in constant danger of failing; so has human government, forgetting that God has made two sexes, depended for its movements hitherto on one alone. The march of human improvement is scarce a proper term to express its past progress, since in order to march, both limbs are required."
Emma Willard's death in 1870 was not so much an occasion for mourning as for praise, as prominent men and women and newspapers reviewed her considerable accomplishment. The permanently endowed school for which she never ceased to lobby was not a reality at her death. But a generation after she was laid in Oakwood Cemetery high on the hills over Troy, her own school made the climb up Mt. Ida to the south, and took its founder's name to the beautiful gothic campus there, constructed with funds from the fortune inherited by Russell Sage's wife and endowed by her, a loving graduate of the Troy Female Seminary.
