Emma Willard PDF Download

To many in the early 1800's, few things seemed more certain to unsex the American woman than a formal education. In the popular view, feminine charm was generally synonymous with ignorance. And unusual was the young lady allowed to study beyond the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic, or (if wealthy) music, painting, embroidery, and French. Then Emma Hart Willard came forward with the disquieting notion -- drawn from her experience as founder of the Middlebury Female Seminary -- that women could indeed, with no obvious harm to health or sensibility, comprehend the higher subjects. Here is the singular story of a dynamic and seemingly tireless woman, devoted ahead of her times to the cause of higher education for women. In 1819, Mrs. Willard presented her Plan for Improving Female Education before the New York legislature. In 1821, with the support of the city's enterprising citizens, she opened the Troy Female Seminary, which in return became the well-known Emma Willard School. It was the early graduates of this school who helped to meet the demand for teachers in burgeoning towns on the Western frontier. The Seminary itself was a model for similar institutions throughout the nation and in Europe, and was forerunner of the Normal School in America. Mrs. Willard wrote textboks in history, astronomy, and geography, and established a school for young women in liberated Greece. Never an active supporter of the suffrage movement, she nevertheless worked continually to prepare women for the responsibilities she knew would come with new civil and political freedoms. Returning to a subject she first treated in 1929, Alma Lutz has written an absorbing account of one woman's contribution to the making of America. Because of Emma Willard's courageous and determined stand, first seminaries and high schools for girls, then women's colleges and coeducational universities, have become a permanent part of American life.