WILLARD, EMMA

born Feb. 23, 1787, Berlin, Conn., U.S. died April 15, 1870, Troy, N.Y. Emma Willard, American steel engraving, 19th century. ne Emma Hart American educator whose work in women's education particularly as founder of Troy Female Seminary, spurred the establishment of high schools for girls and of women's colleges and coeducational universities. Emma Hart was the next-to-last of 17 children; her younger sister was educator and writer Almira Hart (Lincoln Phelps). Encouraged by her father, Emma early began to acquire an education beyond the ordinary. In 1802 she enrolled in her first school, the academy in her native Berlin, Connecticut. Her progress was so rapid that by 1804 she was teaching there, and in 1806 she had charge of the academy for a term. In 1807 she taught briefly in an academy in Westfield, Massachusetts, and then became principal of a girls' academy in Middlebury, Vermont, where in 1809 she married John Willard, a physician 28 years her senior. From her husband's nephew, a student at Middlebury College who lived in the Willards' home, Emma first inferred the vast difference in the educational opportunities open to men and to women. She studied her nephew's textbooks and mastered such subjects as geometry and philosophy. In 1814 Willard opened the Middlebury Female Seminary in her home, and over the next few years she demonstrated that women could teach and girls learn classical and scientific subjects commonly thought suited only to men. Her success prompted her to write An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New-York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education in 1819. The pamphlet was warmly received by such readers as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The legislature addressed failed to respondseveral members ridiculed Willard's outline of a course of academic studies for girls as contrary to God's willbut Governor DeWitt Clinton invited Willard to open a school in New York state. In 1819 Willard moved to Waterford, New York, and opened a school. In 1821 she moved on to Troy, New York, where the town council had raised money to build a girls' school. The Troy Female Seminary opened in September 1821 and began its long history as one of the most influential schools in America. It was a pioneer in the teaching of science, mathematics, and social studies to girls, antedating Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary by 16 years and the first public high schools for girls (in Boston and New York City) by 5. The school attracted students from families of wealth and position and by 1831 had an enrollment of over 300, more than 100 of whom were boarding students. Willard published several textbooks, including History of the United States, or Republic of America (1828) and A System of Universal History in Perspective (1835). She also published a volume of verse, The Fulfilment of a Promise (1831). Of her poems only Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep is remembered. Willard remained head of the Troy Female Seminary until 1838, by which time hundreds of graduates, many of them teachers and all of them shaped by her philosophy, had fanned out across the country. Willard's later years were filled with travel, lecturing, and writing. Among her later books are 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). The Troy Female Seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School in 1895.