The sixteenth of her father's seventeen children and the ninth of her mother's ten children, Emma Hart, daughter of Samuel Hart and his second wife, Lydia Hinsdale Hart, was descended from mid-17th-century American colonists on both sides. Encouraged intellectually by her father, in 1802 she enrolled in the Berlin Academy and in 1805 she began teaching boys and girls in a school in her father's house. In 1806, she took charge of the Berlin Academy for the winter term. While teaching, she continued her own education, as she would throughout her life, taking classes at schools in Hartford during 1805-1806. In 1807 she became the "preceptress" of the female academy in Middlebury, Vt..

      At age 22, in 1809 Emma married the physician and friend of female education Dr. John Willard, then age 50. Willard brought 4 children from earlier marriages to their marriage. Emma's only child, John Willard Hart, was born 1810.

      Her husband's nephew, another John Willard, lived with them while attending nearby Middlebury College. Emma's acquaintance with him and his books ignited Emma's sense of intellectual deprivation which was the typical lot for women of her time. In 1814, her husband suffered sever financial losses, and like many women of her time, Emma felt the need to earn money to help her family survive economically. To that end, Emma opened Middlebury Female Seminary, a girls' school in her home. Denied admission to Middlebury College, she used her nephew's books to teach herself nontraditional subjects so she could teach the topics to her students. The enterprise taught her two lessons that would serve her in the years ahead: she could teach the subjects and female students could master material which was traditionally denied to women.

      Wanting to enlarge her school, she appealed to New York Governor DeWitt Clinton and the New York legislature to support a program of state-aided schools for girls. This first attempt failed. Nonetheless, she moved her school to Waterford, NY in 1819 and in 1821, the town of Troy N.Y. voted to raise $4,000 for a female academy providing she would move her school there. In September 1821, the Troy Female Seminary, offering an education for girls that was comparable to a college preparatory education for boys, under the direction of Emma Willard, opened. Subjects included reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, astronomy, botany, natural philosophy, zoology, geology, mineralogy, chemistry, physiology, history, geography, maps, the globe, Greek and Higher mathematics as well as such women 's finishing schools' staples as drawing, dancing, painting, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Understanding that most of her pupils would become wives and mothers and spend a large part of their lives in the home, Willard also made sure that her students had the necessary home economics and home management skills. If suitable books for teaching her students were unavailable, Willard wrote them herself. Her books and her school were a financial success.

      Her school trained generations of teachers who took her message of intellectual and educational rights for women throughout the United States, especially to the frontier areas. Graduates of the Troy Female Seminary also helped to define the intellectual tone of the middle- and upper-classes of American society in the nineteenth century. Many of the first generation of the female reformers and woman's rights activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attended her school.

      For opening the doors of education to women decades before Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke College or Oberlin College, Antioch College, and other institutions of higher education became co-educational and for making advanced education for women economically viable for both the provider and the student and socially acceptable, Emma Hart Willard exerted a profound on American women and on America. Eventually her vision of intellectual equality for men and women would be exported around the world and schools, colleges, and universities around the world would be opened to women.

Reference

      E. T. James, J. W. James, and P. S. Boyer, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary [Belknap Press of Havard University Press, 1971] pp. 610-613

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