Emma Willard

Emma Hart was born February 23, 1787, on a farm in Berlin, Connecticut, the sixteenth of seventeen children. Formal schooling did not reach her until she was fifteen, and she made up the distance fast, teaching within two years and running an academy within four. She took charge of a female academy in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1807 and married John Willard, a physician twenty-eight years her senior. By 1814 she was unimpressed enough with the finishing-school curriculum offered to girls that she opened a boarding school in her own house instead. What settled the matter, she said afterward, was watching her husband's college-bound nephew study subjects no school in town offered his female cousins.

In 1819 Willard sent the New York legislature a pamphlet, A Plan for Improving Female Education, arguing that women could handle the same rigorous study as men and that the state should help pay for it. Governor DeWitt Clinton backed her, the legislature did not. Troy offered tax relief and a building instead, and the Troy Female Seminary opened there in September 1821, teaching mathematics, philosophy, and natural science to girls whose schooling elsewhere still ended at needlework. Enrollment passed three hundred within a decade, and the seminary trained hundreds of the country's first generation of professional female teachers, who carried its methods into new schoolhouses as the country expanded west. Willard also wrote a widely adopted history and geography curriculum, and with her sister Almira helped found a school for girls in Athens, Greece, in 1833.

Willard argued in print that women's minds had no natural ceiling, yet she never asked for the vote, and in old age she opposed the suffrage campaign her own graduates were building, convinced that education, not the ballot, was the fight worth winning. Her private life held its own reversal. John Willard died in 1825, leaving the school's debts to her alone. In 1838, at fifty-one, she married a New York physician, Christopher Yates. The marriage lasted nine months before they separated, and a divorce followed in 1843. She kept teaching and touring for girls' schools throughout, the same woman who had insisted publicly that a woman's judgment was equal to any curriculum, in a marriage she herself had judged badly.

Willard died in Troy on April 15, 1870, after five decades spent training women to teach in a country that would not let most of them vote or own property outright. The seminary she founded was renamed the Emma Willard School in the 1890s and still operates on a hillside campus above the city, among the oldest continuously running girls' schools in the country. A statue of her went up in Troy in 1895, and induction into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans followed in 1905. The National Women's Hall of Fame did not add her until 2013, recognition that arrived in installments, more than a century apart.

Emma Willard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Plan for Improving Female Education book
  Sent to the New York legislature, arguing for state-funded women's education 1819
• Troy Female Seminary company
  Later renamed the Emma Willard School, still operating today 1821
• The Woodbridge and Willard Geographies and Atlases book
  Co-authored with William Channing Woodbridge; adopted in schools nationally 1823
• History of the United States, or Republic of America book 1828
• School for girls in Athens, Greece other
  Founded with her sister Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps 1833

• 1802 aged ~15 Enrolls in her first formal school at fifteen
• 1807 aged ~20 Becomes principal of a female academy in Middlebury, Vermont
• 1814 aged ~27 Opens a boarding school for girls in her own home Dissatisfied with the curriculum offered to her husband's college-bound nephew but not to his female cousins.
• 1819 aged ~32 Publishes A Plan for Improving Female Education
• September 1821 aged 34 Opens the Troy Female Seminary
• 1825 aged ~38 Her husband, John Willard, dies, leaving the school's debts to her
• 1833 aged ~46 Helps found a school for girls in Athens, Greece
• 1838 aged ~51 Marries Christopher Yates; the marriage ends in divorce by 1843
• April 15, 1870 aged 83 Dies in Troy, New York

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. educated at Troy Female Seminary
• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. opposed the movement of
• Noah Webster 1758–1843
  Lexicographer whose spellers and American dictionary standardized United States spelling and schoolroom instruction. predecessor in American textbook publishing
• Catharine Beecher 1800–1878
  Pioneer in women's education who founded schools and advocated for female teachers across America. competing model of women's education