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FEMALE HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE 1800’S
CONNECTICUT’S EMMA WILLARD
by Anya Laurence
Emma Willard
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Females, in those long ago days, were denied higher education for a number of ridiculous reasons. It would do such damage that their lives would be ruined, for what decent man would want a wife who know more than he did? If educated,women would not be satisfied with menial domestic scrubbing, washing by hand and mending clothes by candlelight. All that could be done by law was enacted to insure that the ladies would be kept in their place...the kitchen. That is until Emma Willard (along with Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon and Prudence Crandall) decided to take matters into their own hands. Emma Hart was born in Berlin, Connecticut, on Lower Lane and Kensington Rd. This property most likely does not still exist, as there have been recent plans to demolish it. Born on February 23,1787, she was the 16th of 17 children born to Lydia Hinsdale Hart and Captain Samuel Hart. At the age of seventeen she began teaching in Berlin and three years later traveled to a female academy in Middlebury, Vermont to accept the position of principal, which she held for three years. In 1814 Emma Willard opened a school for girls in her home. |
  Birthplace of Emma Willard, Berlin, CT |
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| In 1819 she wrote “A Plan for Improving Female Education,” and presented her thoughts and ideas from the book to the New York Legislature. Out of this came an invitation from Governor DeWitt Clinton to open a school in New York. Her first attempt, at Waterford, was met with stony silence and no support, so she moved to Troy, where her seminary opened in September of 1821. This was the first school to offer higher education to females in the United States, and by 1831 three hundred students were enrolled. | |
 Emma Willard School |
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| At this time Emma met and married Dr. John Willard, who was older than she by twenty-eight years. They had one son, John Hart Willard. Dr. Willard died in 1825 and Emma married Dr. Christopher Yates in 1838. The marriage was not happy, and Emma filed for divorce after only nine months, but did not receive the final decree until 1843. After 1838, her son and his wife took over as administrators of the school. | |
 Emma Willard Memorial Historical Marker |
 Emma Willard Middlebury Home |
Emma Willard spent the later years of the life traveling and writing and died at Troy, New York on April15,1870. The school changed names from the Troy Female Seminary to The Emma Willard School in 1895, the same year a statue was erected in her honor in Troy. There is also a memorial to her in Middlebury, Vermont, and she was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx, New York, in 2013, as well as The National Women’s Hall of Fame. But by far the greatest testament to her life’s work is the beautiful sprawling campus of The Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, where I was privileged to teach some years ago.
