Emma Willard and Her Effect on Educational Opportunities

Emma Willard was the first American woman publicly to support higher education for women. Her efforts advanced that movement in the United States. She also wrote a volume of poems that included Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep (1830).
Willard was born in Berlin, Conn., and started teaching school there at the age of 16. In 1809, she married John Willard. In 1814 Emma Hart Willard opened a boarding school for girls in her Middlebury home. Her purpose was to offer improvements in teaching methods and to offer subject areas to women that were missing from girls' schools of the day. …