A Plan for Improving Female Education
By Mrs. Emma Willard
(From a paper read by Mrs. Willard before the members of the New York Legislature, in behalf of a girl’s seminary, in 1819. Reproduced in “Woman and the Higher Education,” Distaff Series.)
The object of this address is to convince the public that a reform with respect to female education is necessary; that it cannot be effected by individual exertion, but that it requires the aid of the Legislature; and, further, by showing the justice, the policy and the magnanimity of such an undertaking, to persuade that body to endow a seminary for females as the commencement of such reformation.
The idea of a college for males will naturally be associated with that of a seminary, instituted and endowed by the public; and the absurdity of sending ladies to college may, at first thought, strike every one to whom this subject shall be proposed. I therefore hasten to observe that the seminary here recommended will be as different from those appropriated to the other sex as the female character and duties are from the male. The business of the husbandman is not to waste his endeavors in seeking to make his orchard attain the strength and majesty of his forest, but to rear each to the perfection of its nature....
1. Females, by having their understandings cultivated, their reasoning powers developed and strengthened, may be expected to act more from the dictates of reason, and less from those of fashion and caprice.
2. With minds thus strengthened, they would be taught systems of morality enforced by the sanctions of religion; and they might be expected to acquire juster and more enlightened views of their duty, and stronger and higher motives in its performance.
3. This plan of education offers all that can be done to preserve female youth from a contempt of useful labor. The pupils would become accustomed to it, in conjunction with the high objects of literature and the elegant pursuits of the fine arts; and it is to be hoped that both from habit and association they might in future life regard it as respectable.
To this it may be added that if housekeeping could be raised to a regular art, and taught from philosophical principles, it would become a higher and more interesting occupation; and ladies of fortune, like wealthy agriculturists, might find that to regulate their business was an agreeable employment.
4. The pupils might be expected to acquire a taste for moral and intellectual pleasures which would buoy them above a passion for show and parade, and which would make them seek to gratify the natural love of superiority by endeavoring to excel others in intrinsic merit rather than in the extrinsic frivolities of dress, furniture, and equipage.
By being enlightened in moral philosophy, and in that which teaches the operation of the mind, females would be enabled to perceive the nature and extent of that influence which they possess over their children, and the obligation which this lays them under to watch the formation of their characters with unceasing vigilance, to become their instructors, to devise plans for their improvement, to weed out the vices of their minds, and to implant and foster the virtues. And surely there is that in the maternal bosom which, when its pleadings shall be aided by education, will overcome the seductions of wealth and fashion, and will lead the mother to seek her happiness in communing with her children, and promoting their welfare, rather than in a heartless intercourse with the votaries of fashion, especially when with an expanded mind she extends her views to futurity, and sees her care to her offspring rewarded by peace of conscience, the blessing of her family, the prosperity of her country, and, finally, with everlasting pleasure to herself and them....
In calling on my patriotic countrymen to effect so noble an object, the consideration of national glory should not be overlooked. Ages have rolled away; barbarians have trodden the weaker sex beneath their feet; tyrants have robbed us of the present light of heaven, and fain would take its future. Nations calling themselves polite have made us the fancied idols of a ridiculous worship, and we have repaid them with ruin for their folly. But where is that wise and heroic country which has considered that our rights are sacred, though we cannot defend them? that, though a weaker, we are an essential part of the body politic, whose corruption or improvement must affect the whole? and which, having thus considered, has sought to give us by education that rank in the scale of being to which our importance entitles us? History shows not that country. It shows many whose legislatures have sought to improve their various vegetable productions and their breeds of useful brutes, but none whose public councils have made it an object of their deliberations to improve the character of their women.