Woman's work in America

by Unknown

The pioneer in the new departure was Mrs. Emma Hart Willard, born in 1787, in Connecticut, into a home of liberal thought and tender affection. The clearness of intellect and keen sense of justice which characterized her life, were all indicated, when, as a young woman, on settling her father’s straightened estate, she insisted that children have no claim as compared with the mother’s superior right to what she has helped to earn. From a child she was noted for interesting herself in the politics of the day. To relieve her husband from financial difficulties, and, as she says, “with the further motive of keeping a better school than those about me,” she established a boarding school at Middlebury. This was the beginning of thirty years’ service as a teacher, during which she taught 5000 pupils, one in ten of whom became teachers. She aimed to make her pupils comprehend the subject taught, and to give them power to communicate what they knew. Says her biographer, Dr. John Lord, “Her profession was an art. She loved it as Palestrina loved music and as Michael Angelo loved painting, and it was its own reward.” There was no flattery to her pupils nor to their parents. Her regular duties, and her never-ending struggle for self-improvement and for better methods of instruction, kept her at her work from ten and sometimes for fifteen hours per day. She keenly felt the disadvantages under which she labored. She wrote: “The Professors of the college attended my examinations, although I was advised by the President that it would not be becoming in me, nor a safe precedent, if I should attend theirs; so, as I had no teacher in learning my new studies, I had no model in teaching or examining them. But I had faith in the clear conclusions of my own mind. I knew that nothing could be truer than truth, and hence I fearlessly brought to examination before the learned the classes to which had been taught the studies I had just acquired.... My neighborhood to Middlebury College made me feel bitterly the disparity in educational facilities between the two sexes, and I hoped if the matter was once set before the men as legislators they would be ready to correct the error.”

To this end Mrs. Willard prepared an address to the public, which in 1819, when she resided in New York, she presented to the New York Legislature. As the views set forth mark a distinct departure in educational demands for women, however familiar or antiquated they may now seem, they are quoted and summarized here. She published them only after long and thoughtful deliberation, and said, “I knew that I should be regarded as visionary, almost to insanity, should I utter the expectations that I secretly entertain.” She asks that as the State has endowed institutions for its sons it shall do the same for its daughters, and “no longer leave them to become the prey of private adventurers, the result of which has been to make the daughters of the rich frivolous and those of the poor drudges.” She laments that “the end of education of one sex has been to please the other ... until we have come to be considered the pampered and wayward babies of society, who must have some rattle put into our hands to keep us from doing mischief to ourselves or to others. But reason and religion teach that we, too, are primary existences; that it is for us to move in the orbit of our duty around the Holy Center of Perfection, the companions, not the satellites of men.”

Mrs. Willard fears that “should the conclusion be almost admitted that our sex, too, are the legitimate children of the Legislature, and that it is their duty to afford us a share of their paternal bounty, the phantom of a college-learned lady would be ready to rise up and destroy every good resolution in our favor.”

To show that it is not a masculine education that is here recommended, Mrs. Willard sketches her ideal of a female seminary. She desires it “to be adapted to the female character and duties, and her first plea is that to which the softer sex should be formed.” “To raise the female character will be to raise that of men.... It would be desirable that the young ladies should spend part of their Sabbaths in hearing discussions relative to the peculiar duties of their sex. The difficulty is not that we are at a loss what sciences we ought to learn, but that we have not proper advantages for learning any.... Many writers have given us excellent advice in regard to what we should be taught, but no Legislature has provided us the means of instruction.... In some of the sciences proper to our sex the books written for the other would need alteration, because in some they presuppose more knowledge than female pupils would possess, in others they have parts not particularly interesting to our sex, and omit subjects immediately relating to their pursuits. Domestic instructions should be considered important. Why may not housewifery be reduced to a system as well as other arts?

“If women were properly fitted for instruction they would be likely to teach children better than the other sex; they could afford to do it cheaper; and men might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the nation by any of those thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred.”

While “coarse men laughed at this proposition to endow a seminary for girls,” the plan was so well received by the Legislature that Mrs. Willard’s Seminary at Waterford was incorporated, and placed on the list of institutions which received a share of the literary fund. Though this was a small recognition of a large need, to New York belongs the honor of making the first appropriation of public funds for the higher education of women.

The character of the support given to Mrs. Willard is more encouraging than the legislative action. Governor Clinton, a man of great educational foresight, recommended Mrs. Willard’s plan in these words, which incidentally indicate common sentiment at the time: “As this is the only attempt ever made to promote the education of the female sex by the patronage of government.... I trust you will not be deterred by commonplace ridicule from extending your munificence to this meritorious work.” Distinguished men advocated the plan before the New York Legislature, and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others wrote letters favoring it, all with little success.

A bill passed the Senate granting $2000 to the seminary of Mrs. Willard at Waterford, but failed in the Lower House.

It was at this seminary that in 1820 a young lady was publicly examined in geometry, and “it called forth a storm of ridicule.”

The corporation of Troy, N. Y., came to the rescue of Mrs. Willard’s project, and raised $4000 by tax, and another fund by subscription, and erected a building of brick, to which Mrs. Willard came in 1821. She was convinced that “young women are capable of applying themselves to the higher branches of knowledge as well as young men,” and that the study of domestic economy could be pursued at the same time. Developing these theories she made for the “Troy Female Seminary” and its pupils a distinguished reputation, and gave a decided uplift to the standard of female education.