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Advancement of Female Education: Or, a Series of Addresses, in Favor of Establishing at Athens, In Greece, a Female Seminary, Especially Designed to Instruct Female Teachers.
Troy [NY]: Published by the Ladies of the “Troy Society,” for the benefit of the proposed Institution. Printed by Norman Tuttle, 1833. 8vo, disbound from sammelband, lacking wrappers. 48 pp. CONDITION: Good, old call number in pencil on label at upper-right corner of title page, bottom edge of title page partially clipped where it was stamped “withdrawn” with “w” of “withdrawn” still visible. First edition of this address by pathbreaking women’s educator and mapmaker Emma Willard urging the establishment of a female seminary in Greece in the wake of its independence from the Ottoman Empire. Emma Willard (née Hart, 1787–1870) was born in Berlin, Connecticut, where she began teaching as a teenager. In 1807 she moved to Middlebury, Vermont, to teach at a small girl’s school; however, frustrated with the limited subjects available to female students and somewhat unpopular for her attempts to broaden her students’ education, in 1814, recently married to Dr. John Willard, she founded her own boarding school, known as Middlebury Female Seminary, in her home. Determined to prove that women were equally capable of mastering the subjects studied by men, Willard began teaching her students the same subjects studied by her nephew, a student at nearby Middlebury College. It was during this early period that Willard, exploring the power of visual learning, began incorporating cartographic education into her curriculum and became the country’s first female map maker. She soon developed a proposal for elevating female education by means of public funding, but after being rebuffed by Vermont lawmakers, moved to New York State, where, with legislative support, she founded the Troy Female Seminary in 1821. This was the first school in the country to offer women an education comparable to that of college-going men, and it soon became “a preeminent school for future teachers and one of the country’s finest institutions of female education” (Mapping, p. 18). After retiring from its management in 1838, Willard continued to lecture and publish widely. Her work inspired a movement that brought higher education to women throughout America and even abroad. Among Willard’s international efforts was her successful campaign—first inspired by Samuel Gridley Howe in 1828, and carried out in collaboration with her younger sister and fellow teacher Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps—to establish a female seminary in Greece. The Greek fight for independence from Ottoman Turkish rule the 1820s aroused American sympathy not only, in Willard’s words, as “a struggling and suffering nation…in the cause of liberty and the rights of man,” but as a revival of classical civilization and ideals and a renewed bulwark against the age-old threat perceived by Western Christendom from Islamic power. As Howe wrote to Willard, “If we would restore Greece to her ancient glory; if we would erect on the outposts of Christendom light-houses and beacons, to guide the missionary and the teacher into the pagan East, we must elevate the moral and intellectual standard of the Greeks; we must make them pioneers of religion and civilization in Asia.” For the women of America, Greek widows and mothers became “sisters” in need of aid, emancipation, and education. “Mrs. Willard’s Address” was delivered by Rev. Mr. Peck at a January 3rd, 1833 meeting at St. John’s Church in Troy, and promotes the Greek seminary, addresses the status of female education in Greece (as well as in Britain and America). Subsequent addresses (“Address II” and “Address III”) were “not read in public, but are here presented for the first time.” Also included are the minutes from the meeting during which the Troy Society for the Advancement of Education in Greece (TSAEG) was formed. An important document relating to international projects of Emma Willard, whose efforts in and beyond the United States ushered in a new era of women’s education. REFERENCES: Sabin 104043; Checklist of American Imprints 22661; Repousis, Angelo. “The Trojan Women: Emma Hart Willard and the Troy Society for the Advancement of Female Education in Greece,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 24, No. 3 (2004); Introduction of “To Mrs Emma Willard” by Dr. [Samuel Gridley] Howe in the American Ladies’ Magazine, October 1834, p. 459.
Item #9783
Price: $950.00
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