Early Life
Emma Hart was born on February 23, 1787, in Berlin, Connecticut. She was the sixteenth of seventeen children from her father, Samuel Hart, and his second wife Lydia Hinsdale Hart. Her father was a farmer who encouraged his children to read and think for themselves. At a young age, Willard’s father recognized her passion for learning. At that time women were only provided basic education. However, Willard was included in family discussions such as politics, philosophy, world politics and mathematics that were primarily male subjects. At age 15, Willard was enrolled in her first school in 1802 in her hometown of Berlin. She progressed so quickly that just two years later she was teaching there at the age of 17. Willard eventually took charge of the academy for a term in 1806.
Read more about this topic: Emma Willard
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914)
“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiperjust running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (19111979)