History
In 1814, Emma Hart Willard opened the Middlebury Female Seminary in her home in Middlebury, Vermont to provide young women with the same higher education as their male peers. Prior to Emma's founding her academic institutions for girls and young women, females had been systematically excluded from pursing the advanced curriculum offerings in mathematics and the sciences that were taught to their male counterparts.
Having taught for a several years, Emma Willard perceived an egregious disparity in the curriculum offerings. In 1819 she promoted a comprehensive secondary and post secondary female educational institution, which would require funding by the State of New York. her address to the office of New York’s “innovative” governor DeWitt Clinton met with initial success. However, the New State legislature at Albany, on hearing her request, responded with mixed sentiment, and ultimately rejected her proposal. Many of the wives of prominent men steadfastly supported and promoted Emma's educational agenda to their friends and associates. Thereafter, the City of Troy's Common Council eventually raised $4,000 that would facilitate Emma’s purchase of a suitable flagship building for her proposed seminary for young women.
Emma had already obtained inexpensive accommodation in a nearby historic, already for the 1800s, Waterford, New York landmark farm. There she had come to rent two nondescript long and narrow stone structures—a former pre-Colonial Dutch estate's outbuildings—located in a picturesque setting along the mighty Mohawk River. The property's border still abuts the Erie Canal’s first but long defunct stone lock, near a major point of the Mohawk's primary arterial confluence into the Hudson River. However, in early 1821, due to a critical funds shortage, owed to a brief economic downturn that had impacted the region, Emma Willard was compelled to close her Waterford Academy.
Toward the close of 1821 she secured $4,000 in funding and relocated to Troy, downstream from Watertown along the Hudson River. The Albany Academy for Boys had been established in March 1813, just downstream from Waterford and Emma Willard’s temporary school; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) opened in 1824. Emma was able to formally found the Troy Female Seminary "for young ladies of means", becoming "the first school in the country to provide girls the same educational opportunities given to boys". The school was immediately successful, and it graduated many great thinkers, including noted social reformer and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Willard remained the head of the seminary until 1838, and in 1895, the school was renamed The Emma Willard School for Girls. In 1910, a new campus was built for the school on Mount Ida.
Read more about this topic: Emma Willard School
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