1 Essential feminist values include: 1) the belief that women should be seen as individual human beings with a range of potentialities which they should be free to develop; 2) men and women should be equal before the law 3) marriage should be a partnership between equals. There are many specific feminist attitudes, but these three are fundamental. For more detailed statements see Rossi, Alice, The Feminist Papers (New York 1974).Google Scholar

Traditional values included these: 1) the idea that woman, the weaker sex, was created to serve man, and her role and functions in life are defined by her sex, 2) the idea that women are feeling rather than reasoning beings 3) the view that women should be pious, submissive, and obedient, putting the needs of husband and children ahead of her own. To these basic ideas which have persisted through centuries were added in the 19th century a cluster of beliefs which laid stress upon the existence of a separate sphere for women in which they were to exercise their moral responsibilities. For detailed statements of the 19th century version of the traditional values see Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly, 18 (1966): 151–175, and Cott, Nancy L., The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, 1977), pp. 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The existence of a large number of women who combined the old values with the new is amply documented in Blair, Karen, “The Clubwoman as Feminist” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, SUNY Buffalo, 1976). For a useful analysis of the concept of women's consciousness see Taft, Jessie, The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness (Chicago, 1915). Other works which have strengthened my conviction that we need to find a new way of describing the distribution of feminist and traditional values in the nineteenth century include, Cott, , Bonds of Womanhood, already cited; Conrad, Susan P., Perish the Thought (New York, 1976); Smith, Daniel Scott, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control and Domestic Feminism in Banner, Lois and Hartman, Mary (eds), Clio's Consciousness Raised (New York, 1974; DuBois, Ellen, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement,” Feminist Studies, 3 (Fall 1975), and Feminism and Suffrage, (Ithaca 1978) I am also indebted to Carl Degler for letting me see the manuscript containing his discussion of the anti-suffragists which will be part of his book on women and families, due out in 1979.Google Scholar It may be relevant to recognize here that holding on to old values and experimenting with new ones is not necessarily a comfortable thing to do. Ambivalence was common among women in the middle of the scale, as is clear from many biographies. The founder of Troy Female Seminary herself once wrote that women who spoke up for women's rights were accused of having cast off their feminine sensitiveness “and often when such women are found moody and are thought capricious it is this which is the cause of their ill-humor and dejection…” See Willard, Emma, The Advancement of Female Education (Troy, N.Y., 1833), p. 10.Google Scholar

3 Of course a larger question is where the new values come from in the first place, but for the purpose of this discussion I want simply to assume their existence, and pursue the question of how they spread and became gradually acceptable to ever larger numbers of women. As is always the case with a major attitudinal change the sources are apt to be complex. In this case they included the rapid population growth and economic development of the country, the changing pattern of production which took many of women's historic functions out of the home, the increasingly pervasive spirit of individualism and egalitarianism among men, the spread of evangelical religion and — possibly — the romantic movement in art and literature.Google Scholar

4 Fairbanks, A.W. Mrs. (ed.), Mrs. Emma Willard and Her Pupils or Fifty Years of the Troy Female Seminary 1822–1872 (New York, 1898). The material in this book was gathered by a committee of alumnae of the school who sent questionnaires to every former pupil they could find, and to friends, descendants and even postmasters of those who had died. The original manuscript questionnaires are in the Archives of Emma Willard School, Troy, New York.Google Scholar

5 See Lord, John, Mrs. Emma Willard (New York, 1873); Fowler, Henry “Emma Willard,” in Barnard, Henry, (ed.), Memoirs of Teachers (New York, 1861); Taylor, James Monroe, Before Vassar Opened (Boston, 1914); Lutz, Alma, Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (Boston, 1929); Goodsell, Willystine, Pioneers of Women's Education (New York, 1931). Brainerd, Ezra, “Mrs. Emma Willard's Life and Work in Middlebury,” read at Rutland, Vt. September 1893 and printed for private distribution by a member of the class of 1841 at Troy Female Seminary. See also A.F. Scott “What Is This American: This New Woman” Journal of American History, 65 (December 1978).Google Scholar

6 Willard, Emma, “An Address to the Public Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education.” (Albany, 1819). Kerber, Linda, “Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic 1787–1805” in McKitrick, Eric, (ed.), The Hofstader Aegis: A Memorial (New York, 1976), pp. 36–59, found all these arguments being made in the years immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. Emma Willard drew them together in a logical progression and tied them to specific proposals for state supported higher education for women and for teacher training. “Nothing in those early days compares in influence … with this noble appeal … it was far beyond anything then proposed or known.” Taylor, James Monroe, Before Vassar Opened (Boston, 1914), pp. 5–6. The Willards had 1000 copies of the Plan printed and bound for sale in bookstores.Google Scholar As I read Willard's early writings, it seems to me likely that she had already begun to observe the general deterioriation of the female personality which occurs when prosperity lightens the load of necessary labor and education has not yet provided other things to think about. Novelists, from Jane Austen and George Eliot to Elizabeth Gundy, have dealt effectively with this phenomenon; historians have tiptoed around it, though it was a familiar theme among nineteenth century feminists of all degrees of radicalism. See Lord p. 110 for her advice to a pupil on the importance of self-education: “It will keep you from that desire of gadding about which is so fatal to the improvement of your sex.” Google Scholar

7 Borrowman, Merle, The Liberal and the Technical in Teacher Education (New York. 1956), p. 55 lists three schools which had set out to train teachers before 1821. He seems never to have heard of Troy, or Mount Holyoke. and therefore is under the misapprehension that serious teacher training began with the first normal school in Massachusetts in 1839. Many other historians of American education have been similarly uninformed.Google Scholar

8 Brainerd, Ezra says that she deliberately chose the word seminary thinking that it would “not create a jealousy that we mean to intrude upon the provence of man.” See “Mrs. Emma Willard's Life …” p. 16. Lord, , Willard, p. 96.Google Scholar Karnes, Henry Home, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Edinburgh, 1751); Paley, William, Paley's Moral Philosophy (London, 1859); Wayland, Francis, The Elements of Moral Science (Cambridge 1963), originally published 1835.Google Scholar

9 Bolzau, Emma Lydia, Almira Lincoln Phelps: Her Life and Work (Philadelphia. 1936).Google Scholar

10 Before one makes too much of the ambitious college curriculum with its Livy, Tacitus and Xenophon as daily fare, it is worth listening to President Francis Wayland of Brown, reporting to the fellows of the college of 1841, asking for a tightening of entrance requirements because “students frequently enter college almost wholly unacquainted with English grammar and unable to write a tolerably legible hand.” The fellows themselves, a year later, noted that “students are frequently admitted very ignorant of the grammars and are uanble to read but a very small portion of Latin and Greek at a lesson.” See Bronson, Walter C., The History of Brown University (Providence, 1914), p. 217.Google Scholar Willard's, pedagogy, more than that prevailing in the colleges, emphasized the development of critical thinking, and while even Harvard still depended upon the deadly daily recitation as its chief pedagogical tool, she introduced the Pestalozzian dialogue, and assured her pupils that, until they had learned a subject well enough to teach it, they could not consider that they had mastered it.Google Scholar The whole question of what constituted higher education” in the nineteenth century is a slippery one. The quality or difficulty of a curriculum was not necessarily revealed by the label placed upon it, and a wide variety of institutions were engaged in providing some part of what would eventually come to be defined as a collegiate education. The variation in institutions was matched by the variation in students, who might be 15 or 50, who might be seeking intellectual culture or professional skills, and who, taken collectively, made up a heterogeneous mass of learners. See Sloan, Douglas, “Harmony, Chaos and Consensus,” Teachers College Record (1971). Opportunities for women to get serious academic instruction developed in bits and pieces from about 1787 to 1821. Then came Troy, and until the opening of Seminary, Holyoke Mt. and the Female, Georgia College in 1836, it provided the best academic opportunity available to women in this country. Lord, John, himself a Dartmouth graduate, testified “Whatever name her school may go by, yet in all essential respects it was a college …” Lord, , Willard, p. 51.Google Scholar

11 The head of the Clinton, Georgia, Female Seminary went in 1837 to see for himself what was going on at Troy. He found Emma Willard's personal appearance “Very different from what I had anticipated. She is considerably above ordinary size of females, quite corpulent, but dignified and commanding, easy and pleasant in her manners; in her conversation shrewd and intelligent, but fond of adulation and self-esteem. Her dress was more gaudy than my ‘beau ideal’ of a literary lady and instructress of youth. I witnessed the examination of her pupils — and was much gratified by their proficiency.” He heard classes examined in arithmetic, French, philosophy, history and geometry. Diary of Slade, Thomas Bog, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina.Google Scholar

12 Lutz, , Emma Willard, p. 173, taken from a speech Stanton made at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.Google Scholar At about the same time a former pupil wrote to Emma Willard's granddaughter, “Your grandmother's great distinction seemed to me to be a supreme confidence in herself and, as a consequence, a stubborn faith in the capacity of her own sex …” Eliza Athrop to Mrs. Scudder, May 9, 1892. Archives of Emma Willard School. Willard herself compared her work in education to that of the Founding Fathers in creating the Constitution! Google Scholar

13 Willard, Emma, Advancement of Female Education (Troy, 1833), p. 9.Google Scholar

14 Lutz, , Emma Willard, p. 121.Google Scholar

15 Typescript in Archives of Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

16 Willard, , Advancement of Female Education, p. 137. In 1826 she had written a member of the New York Assembly: “I never expect that complete justice will be done our sex until this old set [of legislators] are chiefly with their fathers. But I am confident that our cause is a righteous one…” Granger, E. W. Mr., Granger Papers, Library of Congress.Google Scholar

17 “Letter to the Members of the Willard Association for the Mutual Improvement of Teachers” (Troy, 1838), p. 5.Google Scholar

18 See letter from Marks', Julia daughter: “Mrs. Willard, Mrs. Lincoln Phelps and my mother were three educators acting in union….” Archives of the Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

19 Handwritten notes of Davis, Henry Campbell, deposited in South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. In the 1930's Davis was engaged in tracing the influence of Troy in the south and west and concluded that it was “an important fact in the history of culture of America.” As far as I can find out, his research on this subject was not published.Google Scholar

20 Fairbanks, , Mrs. Emma Willard and Her Pupils, pp. 70, 171–172, 201, and manuscript questionnaires for each of these women in the Archives of the Emma Willard School, Troy, N.Y. Google Scholar

21 The work of Willard, Mrs. and her pupils in the common school movement is rarely mentioned in the secondary sources dealing with that movement, which is odd since the richest primary sources The Annals of American Education, The Massachusetts Common School Journal , and Barnard's, Henry American Journal of Education all paid close attention to Willard and her ideas. See Willard, Emma to Barnard, Henry November 18, 1945, Henry Barnard Papers, NYU for an example of the close relationship between them.Google Scholar

22 Willard, Emma to Hotchkiss, Mrs. 30 April 1841 and Willard, Emma to Barnard, Henry, in Barnard, Henry Papers, New York Univesity Library. In a letter to Gov. William Marcy of New York in 1826 she had said “… my views for the advancement of female education are connected with those I entertain of the improvement of the common schools …” Lutz, , Emma Willard, pp. 194–195.Google Scholar

23 Sketch of Sarah Hoxie, Fisher, Mrs. E. W. and Her Pupils p. 516. At about the same time that she was thus paying tribute to the power of the idea of “woman's sphere” she was writing an article for the American Literary Magazine in which she proposed that France which had recently experienced a revolution should set up a separate congress of women to deal with those matters for which women should be especially responsible, including education. See “Letter … on the Political Position of Women” American Literary Magazine (1848), II, pp. 246–54.Google Scholar

24 I do not mean to minimize the importance of the other two women whose contribution to the professionalization of teaching was as important as that of Willard, Emma: Beecher, Catherine and Lyon, Mary. See Sklar, Kathryn K., Catherine Beecher (New Haven, 1974), and the “Following essay” of David Allmendinger on Mt. Holyoke Seminary. Their contributions come a little later.Google Scholar

25 Memorial of the late Willard, Emma Mrs., A Proceedings of the Seventh Anniversary of the University Convocation of the State of New York, Albany 1871, p. 79.Google Scholar

26 Cowles, Margaret Stanley, “A brief sketch of an incident of travel with Mrs. Emma Willard,” Archives of the Emma Willard School, Troy, New York.Google Scholar

27 Fairbanks, Mary to Sage, Olivia Slocum, Archives of the Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

28 Fairbanks, Mary to Sage, Olivia S., 14 October 1895, Archives of Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

29 Nephew of Ziporah de Camp Jacques 1823–1826, Archives of Emma Willard School; Fairbanks, , Mrs. Emma Willard and Her Pupils, p. 405.Google Scholar

30 Memoir, Eunice Samantha Bascom, Archives of Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

31 Mary Newberry Adams of Dubuque, Iowa, to Sage, Olivia S., November 4. 1893. Archives of Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

32 Daughter of Bates, Jane Pelletreau Ashley, replying to questionnaire. Archives of Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

33 Daughters of Dyke, Elsie Van, 1827, and Powell, Agnes, 1829–32, Archives of Emma Willard School; Fairbanks, , Mrs. Emma Willard and Her Pupils p. 399.Google Scholar

34 Daughter of Stewart, Sarah Serbine, Archives of Emma Willard School.Google Scholar

35 Phelps, Almira Lincoln, The Female Student (New York, 1836), contains weekly lectures given to Troy pupils. One continuous thread runs through these lectures: learn to use your mind. Phelps, Mrs. also dwelt upon the need to be prepared for self-support.Google Scholar

36 My collaborator in this venture is Hummer, Professor Patricia presently of the Department of History of Michigan State University. She has done a great part of the technical side of the computer assisted analysis and is planning to write specifically about the Troy women who became teachers.Google Scholar

37 Irene, and Taeuber, Conrad, People of the U.S. in the Twentieth Century, (Wash., D.C., 1971), p. 378.Google Scholar

38 Grabill, Wilson, Kiser, Clyde V. and Whelpton, P.K., Fertility of American Women (New York, 1958), p. 56.Google Scholar

39 In 1974 Melder, Keith published “Masks of Oppression: The Female Seminary Movement in the United States” in New York History, 55 (July, 1974), in which he argued that because of their adherence to the idea of separate spheres, the female seminaries perpetuated the oppression of women. I am persuaded that at least with respect to Troy this is a misapprehension, and that many of Willard's pupils, like Willard herself, found it possible to combine the old values and the new in creative ways.Google Scholar