moting such meetings as the one to which I flatter myself this communication will be read. And the teachers' institutes which have been so profitably held in many counties, would not have existed but for county superintendents. And since the state organization had been productive of so much good, I hope it may be sustained and that more instead of less time of the educated members of society may be devoted to our common schools. If the men amidst their many occupations have not more time to command, there are educated women who have; and who would be honored and their minds made more active and comprehensive, by serving under the superintendents on various committees connected with the welfare of the schools. I do not wish women to act out of their sphere; but it is time that modern improvement should reach their case, and enlarge their sphere, from the walls of their own houses to the limits of the school district. In the use of the pen, women have entered the arena, and if we take all the books which are now published I believe those which well affect the morals of society are the one-half of them the works of women; but in the use of the living voice, women are generally considered as being properly restricted to conversation. St. Paul has said they must not speak in churches, but he has nowhere said they must not speak in schoolhouses. To men is given the duty of providing for children, to women that of applying to their use this provision-and why should not the men and women in school districts meet together for discussion? When the father and mother of a family talk over its affairs do no good suggestions come from the mother? Is it not rather to her mind that the good of the children is ever present? But the father must provide the means. Why then should not the fathers and mothers meet together and let each be heard on a subject of the deepest interest to both, and where the Creator gave to each a part to perform? These suggestions may now sound strange, as they foreshadow a new state of things. But I see it in the future, and rejoice in it as the harbinger of a brighter moral day than the world has yet seen. And when the time of the women shall be occupied under the auspices of the men, and made by their means efficient, then will the whole frame of society be regenerated. Men will be relieved of a burden which however their consciences may feel, they can not fully discharge; women will be honored and elevated, and children will have the full benefit of their mutual and united cares and labors; and the Almighty will smile on a state of society, where the indications of his will are regarded, and followed out into appropriate action. Yours with great respect MRS. EMMA WILLARD EMMA WILLARD The writer of this interesting letter, Mrs. Emma Hunt Willard, the founder and, for many years the conductor of the famous Troy Female Seminary (which, thru the munificence of Mrs. Russell Sage, an early graduate, still survives in modern and rebuilt form, in new buildings and on new grounds, in the city of Troy), was born in Berlin, Conn., 1787. Her father was twice married and reared a family of seventeen children, of whom Mrs. Willard was the sixteenth. She was fortunate in having a father and mother who, according to the standards of the time, were well educated. Her father loved the English Classics, and we are told that, in the evenings, the children often gathered around the old-fashioned fire on the hearth, to hear his readings from Milton and Shakespeare. We read of Mrs. Willard at the age of fourteen wrapping herself in a cloak on a cold wintry night, and studying the stars from a horse block in front of the house. After attending the village academy and then teaching for three years in Berlin, she taught for a short time in Westfield, Mass., and then took charge of a female academy at Middleboro, Vt. Here she met and married Dr. John Willard of that place, a man who ranked high in his profession, and who is said to have had a considerable wealth and an excellent social position. The marriage was a most happy and congenial one; and in her husband's medical library, her biographer says, "she unraveled the mysteries of physiology, took up the study of geometry, and came by successive steps to 'Locke's Essay concerning human understanding."" In the lean times following the war of 1812, financial troubles overtook Dr. Willard, and like many others, he lost his property. His wife, rising to the emergency, opened a girl's boarding school in her own home, "and from this time we find her enlisted in the plan for higher education for women, which when consummated was appropriately called the Magna Charta of the rights of women in matters of education." Finally, leading residents of Waterford, N. Y. induced her to move to that town, where she established a school for women. Her plan for the higher education of women had been endorsed by Governor DeWitt Clinton, who was very advanced for a politician of those days, while prominent men of the time also approved her ideas and aided her loyally in the fulfillment of her ambition. Two years after her school at Waterford had gained considerable notoriety, prominent Trojans offered to furnish a building with the necessary grounds, if the school could be removed to Troy under Mrs. Willard's management. Troy's offer was finally accepted, and the Troy Female Seminary became a prominent and valuable feature in the school life of the state. Mrs. Willard, conscious of deficiencies, set to work and trained herself and her teachers to the highest degree of scholarly efficiency. No pains were too great for her to take in her chosen vocation, no educational field was too large for her to work in. From Troy Seminary, graduate teachers, often educated at Mrs. Willard's expense, were sent west and south and even into foreign countries. And it is safe to say that Mrs. Willard's influence on the characters and lives of these teachers did much, thru the spreading of her kindly and benign teachings, to soften the asperities and disagreeable features which even then attended the advent of a northerner south of Mason and Dixon's line. For example, my mother, a graduate of the class of 1845, taught in one of South Carolina's most noted female seminaries, and only recently in an old-time autograph album, I read some of the kindliest of sentiments for their northern teacher, exprest by these southern belles of the "days befo' the Wah," when she left them to return to her friends in the north. In its way, Troy Seminary was the pioneer in advanced education for women, and in teaching them how to teach, and it was not until the Troy school had been in successful operation for sixteen years that a similar institution was opened in Massachusetts. Beginning in 1822, Mrs. Willard, who realized the serious lack of accurate schoolbooks, set to work to prepare textbooks which would meet, not only her own needs, but those of other schools. A list of her publications either as author, editor or collaborator is most interesting, for it shows the wide scope of this talented woman's unusual abilities. Geographies, histories, maps and physiological works were all the objects of her painstaking work, and when they were published they won the approbation of some of the most noted critics of her time. Some of our modern schoolbook makers could learn much from her method of presenting her subjects. Her influence was felt not only at home, but abroad, and among the most important of her efforts were those which resulted in the establishment of a girl's school in Athens, Greece, about 1831, a project to which she contributed largely of her time and her money. In 1838 she gave over the management of her seminary to her son and his wife, the latter of whom had for many years been the vice-principal. When failing health compelled her to give up her work and to retire to her native town of Berlin, she assumed, at the urgent request of her townspeople as stated in her letter, the duties of a town superintendent of schools. "In her study of the Berlin common schools," a biographer says, "she recognized the defects of their then restricted methods. With her wonted zeal she set herself to stirring up teachers, common councils and legislators, thereby creating an enthusiasm which materially aided the cause of the normal school, now so potent thruout the country." It was during this period of enforced respite from class work, that she traveled and prepared lectures and addresses on various subjects. It speaks well for her ability that in those days, when the woman lecturer was still rare, Mrs. Willard, in company with those pioneer advocates of women's higher sphere in the workaday world, Lydia H. Sigourney, Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, daughter of Professor Moses Stuart, had so far conquered prejudices as to be in constant demand as lecturers on educational and literary topics. In the fall of 1845 she made a professional tour thru southern New York, attending by special invitation institutes for the improvement of teachers in common schools. Over five hundred teachers at Monticello, Binghamton, Owego, Cairo and Rome were addrest and instructed by her. It was about this time, evidently, that the attempt was made to secure her attendance at the Warren County Convention-an invitation which called forth the letter herewith presented. Returning to Troy in 1844, she became what might almost be called the emeritus head of the famous and splendid school for women, and, tho she was no longer active, she exerted an enormous influence in the movement for woman's elevation, especially in the field of education. Here, on the scene of her early struggles and triumphs, she past away on April 15, 1870, universally respected and beloved by thousands of women, whose lives had been touched at some point by her tender and motherly care. How her soul must have rejoiced in that place of rest she now inhabits, at the news printed in the papers of Saturday, January 7th, that out of love for Emma Willard's old school, Mrs. Russell Sage had just given $250,000 more to found "a school of domestic and industrial art" on the site of the old seminary in Troy where Mrs. Sage obtained her early education and from which she was graduated in the Class of 1838. In 1895, at the dedication of the Russell Sage Hall of the then Emma Willard School, Chauncey M. Depew, in speaking of her as "an apostle, an evangel of the higher education of women," and of her struggles for recognition in this country, which finally resulted in the foundation of the Woman's Seminary, said in his felicitous way: "Her influence did not stop here. It crost the ocean; it broke down the prejudices and the conditions of the most conservative of nations; it created Girton and Newnham Colleges under the shadows of Oxford and Cambridge, and it earned for them and for their students equal advantages in the curriculums of these historic seats of learning." As a pebble thrown in a pond starts ever widening and continuing circles, so Emma Willard's life is circling out thru the years that are yet to be. Tho dead, she still lives in the constructive deeds of her students, and her students' students, and thus she will continue to live, as long as time endures. ALBANY, N. Y. JAMES A. HOLDEN |