Pioneer in Women's Education, New York Times Book Review, 1929-06-09

              A Pioneer in Women's Education Emma Willard, Who Founded the Troy Female Seminary, Was Far in Advance of Her Period EMMA WILLARD, DAUGHTER OF DEMOCRACY.  By Alma Lutz.  Illustrated.  291 pp.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.  $4.By FLORENCE FINCH KELLY The world of a hundred years ago is even more profoundly separated from the world of today by its ideas, principles and convictions than by its material conditions, even if the contrasts in the latter do include the deacon's "one-hoss shay" and Colonel Lindbergh's airplane.  For man easily and quickly adapts himself to a changing environment, but he holds to what he believes, or thinks he believes, with a bulldog grip.  And for that reason Emma Willard, enthusiastic and persistent pioneer not only of education for women but for progressive aims and methods in education, deserves grateful thought from every college girl in America, and the tribute of every one interested in the breaking up of old, crusted traditions and the blazing of new trails of thought and purpose.  A hundred years ago she did a big, necessary fundamental job for civilization, whose fruitful results increase with the years, and the way she did it.  The difficulties she encountered and what it meant at that time and since, as Alma Lutz tells the story in this book, make a vital and illuminating chapter in American history.Emma Willard is worth the attention of those interested in character because she possessed so strong an individuality and was so much in advance of her period.  For the eugenist there is in her character and her ancestry convincing material for his contentions.  For one both sides of her parentage the line of descent came down through generations of sturdy, capable, outstanding men and women who had pioneered in Massachusetts and Connecticut through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Considering the times in which they lived, they were unusually free from bigotry, liberal and forward-looking in their ideas and desirous of putting these into practice.  This was especially true of her father, Samuel Hart, a Connecticut farmer, who seems to have been a man of much more than usual intelligence and culture, courageous and independent, and so free and advanced in his ideas that when his little daughter, Emma, his sixteenth child, began to hunger for knowledge forbidden to women in those days he gave her all possible sympathy, encouragement and help.  That was in the closing years of the eighteenth century, when almost every one believed that girls had neither the mental ability nor the physical stamina to study any branch of mathematics, except to learn a little of the essentials of arithmetic.  It was considered most unwomanly for "females" to know anything about or be interested in history or other masculine studies.  Until some time after the establishment of the Republic district schools were solely for boys and, as Mrs. Lutz points out, opposition lingered long "to the spending of public money on 'schools for shes'."  But gradually girls were allowed to use the schoolhouse and have a teacher during the Summer months while the boys were busy with farm work, and after a while objection dwindled away to their presence during Winter terms.  But all the education they received there was barely enough to enable them to read the Bible and such books as were published especially for the "improvement of females" - which mostly impressed upon them the virtue of cultivating their accepted inferiority - a little writing and a little arithmetic.  Boarding schools, which only the daughters of the well-to-do attended, taught these essentials and stressed such accomplishments as "painting, embriodery, French, a song or two for company, playing on the harpsichord, and the making of wax and shell ornaments.That was the sort of world for women upon which young Emma Hart looked out when, at the turn of the century, she determined that she would study geometry.  Everybody said that girls didn't have brains enough to study geometry and that it would work disaster upon them individually and on the race if they attempted it.  She didn't believe any of this and she wanted to prove that it wasn't true.  So, at the age of 12, she got a book, sat down on the floor in front of the broad white marble hearth with a piece of charcoal and began teaching herself.  It was a highly audacious and rebellious thing for a young woman to do, but she had the sympathy of her family and she did it quietly at home.  And therein lies no small part of the reasons for her remarkable success all her life in combating and overcoming prejudice and narrowness.  She proved things by trial to her own satisfaction first, and then went quietly about the task of getting the public to accept her ideas.  She never flaunted her rebellions, she never antagonized public opinion any further than was necessary, she tried always to placate, to persuade, to convince by proofs, and she was always in appearance, manner and deportment the charming, gracious, conventional lady that the standards of her time admired.  Beginning as a country school teacher in her latter teens and taking every opportunity to extend her knowledge, in a few years she had a reputation for teaching ability and high character not only in Connecticut but in all the adjoining States, and could choose whatever position promised best opportunities.Mrs. Lutz brings out interestingly the methods by which, wherever she taught, she raised the standard and enlarged the field for the education of young women without arousing prejudice and antagonism.  From the beginning she would have her pupils do, now and then, unusual but interesting things, and it was one of her constant principles of teaching to introduce as frequently as she thought her pupils ready for it a new study.  There were not, usually, textbooks for these "new studies," and she herself had to do her own studying a lesson or two in advance and prepare the material for the class lessons.  When she was 20 she was offered the position of preceptress of Middlebury Female Academy, and there she met and married Dr. Willard, a prominent citizen of the place, who was more than twice her age.  He too was sympathetic with her ideas and gave her encouragement and assistance until his death, after almost twenty years of happy and congenial companionship.  During all that time Mrs. Willard's active and fertile mind was advancing and broadening and she was applying in her own teaching her developing ideals and plans.  And finally, at the age of 34, she launched her great contribution to the cause of the better education of women, her Troy Female Seminary, wherein she introduced the subjects and the methods of teaching them that made it a high light in the educational world of a hundred years ago.  But first she had worked out a "Plan for Improving Female Education" that was so forward-looking, so able and so logical, that fifty years later educators still studied it with respect.  It has been said of this plan that it laid the foundation upon which every woman's college in this country has since been built.  It attracted a great deal of attention and aroused both appreciative endorsement and no little scandalized comment.  "They'll be wanting to educate the cows next," said one indignant objector.Mrs. Willard had, evidently, a mind avid of knowledge and well endowed with intellectual curiosity, and as she ventured out into new realms usually closed to her sex unless they opened the gates themselves, she brought back the fruits of her forays and spread them before her pupils.  She became interested in physiology and, realized its importance, she added it to her curriculum and therby aroused indignant protest among her critics.  "Mothers visiting a class at the seminary in the early '30s," says Mrs. Lutz, "were so shocked at the sight of a pupil drwaing a heart, arteries and veins on a blackboard to explain the circulation of the blood that they left the room in shame and dismay."  Mrs. Willard, she adds, was willing to make such concessions as pasting paper over the textbook pages depicting the human body, but she felt that her students should have some knowledge of physiology, and therefore "it remained part of her curriculum in spite of the wails and protests of the decorous and the slurs of the indignant male."  She always thought mathematics of prime importance to a girl's education because if would train her to think for herself and to look at her problems in an orderly, less personal way.  She devised new and more interesting ways of studying geography, literature and history, methods that have been slowly making their influence felt in educational systems ever since and now have become commonplace.  But a hundred years ago they were startling in their newness and difference.  She wrote textbooks of history and geography that embodied her ideas, and she early realized the importance of the proper training of teachers and gave it much attention in her curriculum and in her activities outside her seminary.Although she was always, from her girlhood, keenly interested in public affairs, history and politics, Mrs. Willard never took any part in or showed any sympathy with the Women's Rights movement, which started while she was at the peak of her activities.  But she was then extremely busy on her own projects, even after she turned the seminary over to the management of her son, was doing everything she could to forward the work that had always been nearest her heart, that of improving methods of teaching, making school work more interesting, enlarging its field, bringing it into closer contact with life.  And in all this she was from the first and steadily kept fifty years in advance of her own time.  Her interests ranged widely over all the affairs of mankind.  In 1820, when she was 33 years old, she worked out a plan for universal peace through a confederacy of nations, and forty-four years later took it up again and developed it more fully, making its central idea a permanent judicial tribunal and peace council in Jerusalem, with an international assembly meeting to prepare a code of international laws - a very good pre-vision of the League of Nations and World Court half a century too soon.Aside from the very great influence she exerted in changing public opinion toward the education of women and upon its shaping and developing and upon certain phases of education in general, Mrs. Willard's story rewards the reader because of her interesting personality, her rich intellectual endowments and her practical ability in turning these to the service of her time.  Mrs. Lutz's account of her, while it is a bit heavy-footed and would have gained much by a more vivid and dramatic manner of telling, is a capable and authoritative biography.